Good morning everyone. Good morning. So we're going to get started. So good morning everyone. Welcome. I'm Melanie Greenberg, the president and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and it is such a joy and a pleasure to gather here in the magnificent headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace to explore together some of the greatest challenges facing us today during a very tumultuous time at home and in the world. Today's theme is peace and democracy in a turbulent world. Why? 1.5 billion people live in fragile states where a lack of effective government structures and restricted space for civil society contribute to cycles of violence. We know that corruption is a major source of grievance in many states, and serves as a key driver for extremism and conflict. We've seen recently with the Ebola conflict how a lack of trust and governance can exacerbate other kinds of crises. And we know that when security and police forces are either overly aggressive and restrictive or overly weak, that's a very important source of unrest and a source of lack of trust and government, which I might mention is not only a problem in the South Sudan's of the world, but in the Baltimore's of the world as well. Conversely, we know that when there's both an effective social contract between government and society and effective space for citizen voice and cooperation, these provide the scaffolding for resilient societies that can resolve their differences through consensus building and through politics, rather than through deadly violence. What we'll explore today and in the next two days of our conference is how peace building and democracy come together and how we can develop joint approaches to the tremendous global challenges facing us in the years ahead. This intersectoral dialogue between peace building and democracy takes place within a larger initiative at AFP that we're calling peace building 3.0. And in peace building 3.0, we understand that conflict happens in very complex systems and no one field can take linear solutions and solve these complex problems. We need to work together as peace builders with democracy, development, rule of law, health, education, women in peace building and all understand our places in these systems and how to learn to cooperate between fields with very different methodologies, philosophies, ideologies. So this conference in our discussion today is part of that effort to bring different fields together to recognize our complexity. Before moving on to our wonderful program and we're just so honored to have Under Secretary Sarah Swoll here with us today, I wanted to make a few thank yous. This is one of the few times that we'll all be together in the course of the day. First, to thank USIP for hosting us today. To thank Nancy Lindborg, USIP's new president, one of my great heroes in the peace building field. And it brings us such pleasure to work with you here at USIP. We look forward just to wonderful partnership ahead. And great thanks also to Linwood Ham and Sarah Ogosi who've made our planning for this conference. There were a lot of moving parts, just so joyful. So thank you. Also AFP staff in the room, can you raise your hands if you're here? I can tell you that AFP staff and interns have been working literally 24-7 for the last week and very hard of the last nine months to bring this all together. And I want especially to thank Emily Malotsi and Becca Weinstein for all the work that they've done. And I know all of you have worked with them to register and to say thank you very much. And a quick thank you as well to AFP's board and also to Bob Berg who has just endowed a lecture series called Challenges to Peace Building in the Years Ahead. So we are now guaranteed of 10 years of discussions like this, looking at the frontiers of peace building. And finally I want to thank my parents, Jane and Larry Cohen who are sitting in about the fifth row here. And my father's childhood friend, Tully Plesser who's joined us as well. We have a sweep of history here in the room today. So thanks to all of you and we look forward to a wonderful day ahead. One note, everything today is on the record. We do have journalists in the room. It's being webcast to around the world. So this gives us a wonderful opportunity but just to let you know that this will be quite open. Thank you and it's wonderful to introduce Nancy Lindborg. Thank you, Melanie. And great to see everybody here today. There were a lot of hugs around coffee as we prepared to come in and that's always a good sign for people who are taking this opportunity to come together and really dig into some of these critical issues. Melanie, thank you for your comments. And I want to also give a special shout out to Melanie who's been a real thinker, leader, writer, scholar in this field who's really helped us think of peace building as a much larger endeavor that encompasses the kind of issues we'll be talking about the next several days. So Melanie, thank you for your vision and leadership. This USIP AFP conference partnership is really one of the signature activities that we do together and I'm delighted to be here for it and I very much applaud the title and the set of topics that will be looked at today. We are clearly in a turbulent time where there is the need for people to come together as Melanie said across disciplines, across ways of looking at the world to understand how to bring all of this energy and knowledge to bear in a world that is definitely going through some difficult transition times with no indication that we'll be through it in the near future. I had the great honor of being sworn into USIP as the president just about three and a half months ago and as many of you know USIP is an independent, nonpartisan, congressionally funded institute that really dares to envision a world without violent conflict and I can't imagine a better or more audacious vision and one that all of the people of USIP are pleased to be able to dedicate their work and their time to. We do this by really seeking to build America's national capability to prevent, mitigate and resolve violent conflict and we support peacemakers at every level, national, regional and local. I've had a chance to visit a couple of our field programs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and just recently Burma and have been ever more impressed at the ways in which people at the community levels are connecting up to the national levels and supporting peace processes with a lot of creativity and a lot of determination. This is a great assemblage over the next three days that really does bring together people of very diverse interests and I'm eager to see how the conversation evolves. I'm also very honored and eager to introduce our special guest today, Sarah Sewell, who is the Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights at the State Department and Sarah was sworn into this position just over a year ago, a year in a court, probably seems like a lifetime, Sarah. I know that you've been on the road and working hard. Over the last decade where a number of you have probably had a chance to meet Sarah, she taught at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where she was also the Director of the Car Center for Human Rights Policy and in this position she launched the Mass Atrocities Response Operations Project or MERO and directed the program on national security and human rights. She served on a number of boards and in her time in this, as Undersecretary, she has become a leading voice for mass atrocities as something that we need to pay close attention to and get ahead of. She is a champion for action and she's bringing her full energy, her vision and her commitment to a very critical role in the U.S. government. Sarah, thank you for being with us today and please join me in welcoming her. So thank you, Nancy, for hosting this super important conference. I'm really pleased to be here with you all this afternoon and thank you, Nancy, for your assumption of the leadership of the Institute for Peace. I think that all of us who have watched the Institute have really high hopes for its evolution and the ways in which it's going to contribute to realizing that audacious vision that you described. And thanks, Melanie, for your introduction and for leading the Alliance for Peace Building. It's really, it's nice when you work in government to come to a meeting that is full of non-government people and know a lot of them. It's really nice and to respect their work and to feel connected to their work. It's a privilege and so I want to just begin by thanking all of you for your very important contributions to this audacious vision of peace that we are all working toward. So this morning, I would like to talk a little bit about, before joining in a broader conversation, about how the U.S. government is working to reduce the risk of violence worldwide and to give you some sense, which is, I think, sometimes difficult to convey because the context in which government policy is made, and no one knows this better than Nancy, but is sometimes mind-numbingly bureaucratic and procedural and mechanistic and feels very divorced from the kind of interpersonal relationships that you can see and feel and touch on the ground in the fieldwork that many of you engage in or support. And yet, the kinds of changes that fall into this category of mind-numbingness to an external actor are sometimes of fundamental importance for outcomes in terms of policy and therefore translating into action on the ground. And so I hope you'll bear with me if it seems somewhat arcane and abstract and just trust me that everything that I'm describing in our small world, some of my teams here in the front row, counts as a significant success and the result of a lot of elbow grease and hard work. So when I took this job as Undersecretary for Civilian Security, I saw it as an opportunity to essentially continue the work that I'd been doing prior to rejoining government. It was an effort to strengthen the U.S. collective effort within government, to pursue the American values that I think inspired most of us as we joined this work, tolerance, liberty, human dignity. And the values are ends in themselves. The values are our words to which we and our politicians pay homage. But they are more than our national values. They really are universal values and they really do lie at the cornerstone of not just our peace and security as members of a global community, but indeed for the stability and the sustainability of the international architecture into the 21st century. So the office that I'm in now at the State Department leads the department's work at the intersection of security and human rights, sometimes uneasy nexus that I've occupied for a very long time. I'm sure products and law enforcement, human rights, democracy, refugee assistance, human trafficking, global criminal justice. So when what is known as the J Bureau was created, for some people it seemed like a really odd melange of different bureaus with very different and competing missions. But if you occupy this nexus that I just described where you see as fundamental the relationship between rights and security, between justice and peace, this constellation of bureaus makes all the sense in the world and offers hope in a very concrete, if bureaucratic way that the United States can join together the strands of security and peace in a form that has been elusive in some periods of our history. So if you assume that human rights and security are closely interwoven, you see security as a means of promoting human rights and you see that crises and instability weaken the social and governmental structures that are necessary for protecting citizens from abuse. And so our core mission at J is to encourage and support rights and justice respecting societies in which people can live freely and safely. And so since coming to the office, I've really put an emphasis on improving the government's responsibility to respond to mass atrocities, the use of systematic violence against civilians. This is not a unique focus of mine. You will all know that President Obama some three years ago identified the prevention of mass atrocities as a core national security interest of the United States in addition to being a moral responsibility and he committed the United States to becoming a global leader in preventing wide-scale violence against civilians. The President's National Security Strategy and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review QDDR, see I'm already numbing you, that was rolled out just two weeks ago by Secretary Kerry, reiterate the importance of preventing mass atrocities as a strategic priority. And, you know, as global citizens, as people who read the newspaper, we cannot help but understand that this issue looms extremely large for the world as a whole. Places, in particular those that are already marginalized and vulnerable, if not already riddled with conflicts, so places such as Sudan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, all at risk. And to meet these threats to prevent conflicts from escalating, the government is seeking to improve the ability of countries and local communities to identify and quickly address the risks of large-scale violence when they arise. And we all have a role to play and I'm simply going to explain how we've been seeking to strengthen the State Department's role. First, the promise of prevention. Government policymaking, institutional policymaking, sometimes individual policymaking, we all know that prevention is the wisest investment of resources and yet it's often very difficult to actually work our systems and our choices to prioritize prevention efforts. It more effectively mitigates risks before crises erupts, it reduces the costs that come with full-scale response, saves lives. Preventing threats is just not an automatic reflex for government nor is it typically reflected in the way that we budget. We respond to ongoing crises, that is sort of what catapults a complex checks and balances system to actually move and prevention is something that because it works over the longer term and because it often works in avoiding the foul in the non-barking dog, it's harder to show the concrete results that so many are focused on whether they're in the donor community or whether they sit in Congress. So the importance of prevention is confronted by the difficulty of actually prioritizing prevention in complex decision making. And so the role of your organization's outside of government is to constantly press us to do just that. We are working within state to try to do that within the context of government decision making. To incorporate prevention thinking into the mechanics of government, we are seeking to institutionalize prevention in ways that go beyond what is commonly understood and talked about, which is the Atrocity Prevention Board as an entity. We're working to institutionalize prevention in all aspects of the way that the State Department thinks about and executes its responsibilities. So the fast-moving threats, the wolf at the door, the urgent inbox is what tends to preoccupy the government. One of the advantages of being a functional bureau within the State Department is that we can think more long-term and more strategically about what lies over the horizon. And we are better positioned to bring prevention concerns and priorities to the balance of our colleagues at State that are focused on the immediate crises. So we have worked to build mechanisms within our government deliberative processes and within our budgeting and within the way that we think about who's in the room for a given discussion to make sure that prevention is on the agenda in a way that is more central than has typically been true in the past. The APB itself, the Atrocities Prevention Board, scans the horizon to look for emergent threats and is charged with helping push the system to prioritize the those challenges as in a preventive vein. And the early morning indicators work that many of you have been involved in and that has gone on for a long time outside of government has now been incorporated within government within the way the intelligence community thinks about its responsibilities and how it defines its priorities. And building on that institutionalized change, the Atrocities Prevention Board is better equipped to do that work of early identification. So we will look every month at a handful of countries that have been identified by the intelligence community where the risk factors lie in that particular country or region and we will see to identify gaps in opportunities that can be met in advance early on. So the Atrocities Prevention Board does in an interagency context in which Nancy was a critical participant when she served in government for AID. In an interagency context sets the tone, but the real work has to happen within agencies as they identify what it is that they can do and enable either programmatically or in terms of budget or in terms of diplomacy to work on the prevention angle. So let me take this abstract description and try to make it more concrete. And I do this with a great deal of humility because I'm going to talk about the example of Burundi. And as you all know, the current political crisis in Burundi with the president having asserted his right to run for a third term in contravention of the Arusha Accords has caused enormous dislocation and increased violence and refugee flows within the country. So I'm going to provide this example that looks at the Atrocities Prevention Board's efforts vis-a-vis Burundi starting from two years ago. And the claim that I'm going to make is not that we were able to prevent atrocities forever, but that we positioned the U.S. government, our ambassador in Burundi, and the concerned international community in a much better place to respond to what are now the risks of mass atrocities and violence. So the APB, looking based on the intelligence communities scanning of the horizon that I just referred to, this institutionalization of the prevention of mass atrocities agenda into the way the government prioritizes issues, had identified Burundi as a country at risk. And some two years ago, the different agencies of government came together and identified gaps in our programming, in our understanding of the situation, in our peace building efforts on the ground, in the communication among key actors within Burundi, and worked to scrounge together some $7 million worth of resources to support programs and efforts that aimed to fill those gaps. So the funding bolstered coordination with partners. It enabled the department to deploy civilian conflict experts to augment what was a very small embassy team. And it laid the groundwork for a much deeper understanding and faster understanding within the government of what is going on now as we prepare to potentially respond to these increasingly worrying signs in Burundi today. So we're working within the State Department, as I think about the atrocities prevention interagency process, within the State Department, we have a responsibility to instill within the bureaucracy itself, not just have it lodged at the level of the whole of government, the prevention analysis piece. And I've directed that to reside in the Conflict and Stabilizations Operations Bureau. It is a redirection of the Bureau in the sense that the Bureau had become very programmatic in its focus. We are seeking to restore a balance between the analytic and policy side of CSO's work with its programatics. And what CSO is doing in coordination in most cases with AID that has really been a leader in this field over the long haul in terms of its conflict assessment work. But AID and State have come together to refine their conflict assessment tools as they relate to mass atrocities. And we are instilling within the State Department training, training that exists for Foreign Service Officers and other State Department employees, but also creating toolkits that will go out to posts that are at risks and are available to anyone who is deploying to a country that is on our screen as being potentially at risk of mass atrocities. CSO is also rededicating itself to capturing lessons learned. I have been amazed as coming from academia at the difficulty that the at least the State Department appears to have in capturing learning and conveying it in other than a person to person point to point manner. And so institutionalizing best practices, institutionalizing case studies so that those who come to the next crisis don't have to learn the hard way is a priority that we have established for CSO. Disseminating those resources because the regional, first of all, everyone within the Foreign Service at least is constantly moving and rotating through. And so while you may have regional expertise, as you all know, conflicts are very specific to a particular context. And so knowing what happens for countries over 10 years ago doesn't necessarily prepare you well for an emerging conflict in Country X that is different. But also the constant churn means that there is more of a difficulty in raising issues that are not considered to be the top priority of the crisis issue. So we have to both provide the tools for people to make the prevention case and we have to provide the reinforcement psychologically for people to feel that it is important and indeed expected that they will raise the prevention case. And so that is really what CSO is seeking to do within the Foreign Service culture and within the bureaucracy at the State Department. We have to look at our existing activities. This is another thing that CSO will be doing in partnership with others to investigate how existing investments in the rule of law in gender equality or political participation can lay the foundation that can contribute to preventing violence. There is a lot that the State Department does long term that with more attention and more tailoring can serve multiple purposes. And the longer I am back in government, the longer I see the more deeply I understand the enormity of challenges that are out there globally, the more I appreciate the limitations of our own resources and our own reach, the more I firmly believe that everything that we do, whether it is development or whether it is institution building, absolutely needs to be done through a prevention lens where it is multi-purpose investment. And there are tweaks in the way that we can do this that I think will yield big benefits going forward. And this relates very much to the third emphasis that we've had in the State Department within the J undersecretariat since I came to it, which is this notion that's very familiar to all of you and that's very familiar to our colleagues at AID. But that is not typically the way the State Department has thought about its work because the State Department typically is focused on embassies that deal with governments and relationships that are intergovernmental and meetings and processes that are intergovernmental. We at J really look at the world through the lens of the global citizen and so we think about strengthening communities. And so this emphasis on what it means to promote the strength and health and resilience of communities at the local level is something that we are seeking to inculcate throughout the department. When the forces of instability threaten the fabric of a society, the odds are increased that the community can resist those threats when we strengthen the health of that community. So whether you're talking about conflict in general, whether you're talking about violent extremism, whether you're talking about the marginalization and use of violence against a particular subset of that community, these are all risks that have security implications that can be addressed by strengthening community processes. And the State Department's tools which tend to be geared toward government partners can be adjusted and augmented in ways that really develop the community piece and focus on the relationship of the community to the government in ways that are also extremely helpful for community resilience and for governance in general. And so that's an enormous cultural change that we are just beginning to address.  So the long-term peace building doesn't begin and end with a focus on national governments. And so this is why as we looked to, for example, the challenge in the Central African Republic, part of our augmentation of resources, some $30 million, went to community and grassroots peace and reconciliation programs. Part of our effort was having President Obama record a radio address that was broadcast to the people of that country. Governments everywhere are strengthened when they work in partnership with communities. And so trying to create a balanced approach to peace means that we have to leaven our approach to foreign assistance and partnership to think beyond governments, to think about not just civil society, where I think the State Department has evolved in terms of both who it communicates with and who it sees as partners in development or foreign assistance work, but also really focus on the communities themselves that are the embodiments of that global citizen that we increasingly need to think about in a world in which borders become less important in many respects. A fourth feature of our approach is partnerships. I've touched on this already, the ways. I was really struck in a really positive way when I returned to government in the State Department by the prominence that is attributed to civil society organizations in dialogue, both in the field and in Washington. The role of non-governmental actors I think will only continue to grow. We within the State Department increasingly see not just the layers, but also the breadth of multinational or multi-organizational partnerships as being essential to anything that we do, and it's not simply a function of limited resources. It's a function of the need to have multiple pressure points or multiple engagement points on any given problem set. So for example, we at J have started a dialogue with the European Union, the civilian security and development dialogue that aims at bringing the EU apparatus to include DEFCO into a discussion about how do we strengthen community resilience and how do we work collectively when we are mutually concerned about a country at risk. We meet regularly with UN counterparts, both individuals who are special rapporteurs on issues like genocide or transitional justice, but also with the internal apparatus within the UN leaders of initiatives such as Rights Up Front that seek to help the UN make much of the same preventive change that we are seeking to institutionalize within the State Department. At the local level, the community engagement, one of our big challenges is trying to learn how to bring our investments in communities back to Washington. I have a feeling that we could probably learn from some of you in how to best do that, but we certainly do rely on the Institute of Peace because of its many events and because it's just next door. So it's so easy to come and hear from people who are in Washington from the field, from local communities about how programs and engagements are working and affecting them. So in sum, when the Secretary announced the release of the QDDR, he said, power dwells increasingly in networks rather than hierarchies. We have to engage with an ever-expanding array of organizations, groups in regional and subnational leaders. This is really a fundamental challenge for us, but it's space within which you move seamlessly. And so I hope we can rely on you to continue to keep us honest and evolve our efforts in taking communities and citizens seriously in national government policymaking. I want to just say a very brief word and we can talk about it more in the Q&A if you wish, but the emphasis that the President and the Secretary of State are now putting on the prevention agenda as it relates to the threat of global terrorism, I think is a really noteworthy evolution. And I want to flag it for you. It may not be what you all think of as central to your own work as peace builders, but I can tell you, based on my travels, including most recently with the Secretary in Kenya, the issue of community resilience, the issue of interfaith dialogue, the issue of government-community relationships is absolutely central to preventing the rise of violent extremism and that next generation of government and community and citizen is absolutely vital for dealing with a panoply of challenges, but centrally to this question of violent extremism and terrorism. And we have seen that as important as the use of force and intelligence tools may be that at the end of the day, this is psychological, this is a question of belief, this is a question of pull factors, this is also a question of underlying causes and push factors that have to do with alienation, with marginalization, with a host of things that are really central to the work that many of you have studied and been active in. And so when the White House convenes a summit on countering violent extremism, and the main word at that summit is how do we prevent violent extremism, that's a really important and positive and energizing possibility and an invitation to all of you to think about how you can contribute to that expansion, to that complementarity of our current hard security approaches to countering terrorism, and how do we think about getting ahead of the curve? How do we think about preventing those next generation of extremists from emerging? How do we think about keeping communities healthy so that children can be protected from the lure of this aberrant, nihilistic, ideological and behavioral pull? How do we prevent that? And that I think is peacebuilding at its core, that I think is a huge opportunity for all of us. I think it's an opportunity that if we fail to really engage it, if we fail to embrace it, to walk into that space that sometimes at an uncomfortable nexus, because not everyone in the peace community wants to talk about terrorism or wants to feel that their work is somehow connected to an anti-terrorism effort, but I promise you this is an invitation that we do not want to pass up. This is a door through which we must walk because the peacebuilding is so central to what it means to promote tolerance. Those values that I mentioned in the beginning, liberty, tolerance, inclusion, freedom, human rights, this is fundamentally at risk in any struggle against terrorism. And the more we can use the non-kinetic tools, the more we can act earlier in a cycle of radicalization, the better we can harness all layers of society in fighting against intolerance and nihilism and violence. The closer we will be to the world that we all wish to see. So I hope very much that for those of you who are already engaged in work at this nexus, you will recommit yourselves and that we can support you. And I hope for those who have yet to venture into this space that you will find it possible to do so because we really do need your help. So sorry to go on so long, but thank you very much. Thank you, Sarah, so much for that speech. It is such a joy as a member of the peacebuilding community to hear a government official, especially one which has you have such a 30,000-foot view over so many fields, echoing the values that we place on prevention of positive change in the world in a very sophisticated nuanced way. You're not saying that it's easy and we very much appreciate your offering to join us in this challenge. So thank you so much. And it is wonderful to have a chance to talk with both of you who, I guess together, have the 60,000-foot view on the whole peace and development and security landscape. And it's wonderful to have this opportunity to go a little bit deeper. So could everyone hear okay? Are mics good? So I have a range of questions for you, but I wonder if we can start on the CVE question on which you ended your talk. And to share some perspectives of how USIP is thinking about CVE and PVE, ways in which we can help you, Sarah, in your role. And one question I have is, to what extent is it enough just to do good peacebuilding and development? Do we need to label it specifically as CVE? And one concern that we have in the peacebuilding community is a certain instrumentalization of our work. And so our partners in the ground field, we're not doing this to create sustainable, healthy communities, but to root out the cancer of the extremists. So where do you both come down on the labeling issue and how to make sure that we have the trust of local partners in doing this very ambitious work? You know, this is, I think, a really important question because as anytime when you have an emergence of an important new collective effort, there's a certain bagginess in the definitions. And so what exactly is in countering what's in preventing violent extremism? I think it's a really important robust debate that's going on. And it's understanding how do the Venn diagrams of good development work, of good peacebuilding work, and of good countering and or preventing violent extremism, what's in that set of Venn diagrams? Where are the overlaps and how do you understand not to overly instrumentalize approaches, motives, you know, aspirations of the people with whom you're working? So I think we're walking down that pathway together. Fundamentally, I think, as Sarah said, if you are helping communities to be strong, to be resilient, to realize their own aspirations, connect state society relations in a more positive, productive, effective way, that you are working upstream and there becomes less of a distinction between preventing peacebuilding and development. But the further you go downstream, I think these efforts start to differentiate more as you need to more specifically address the already difficult strands of violence or extremism that may have existed. Thank you. And this is a good conversation for all of us to continue to really focus on and get clarity and agreement on the terms on what we mean by this and how we understand success. So I think one of the interesting opportunities for all of us as an international community interested in peace will be to look at the UN's new countering violent extremism approach.  I mean, for the Secretary General, the pivotal opportunity as he described it in his statement was to take the prevention approach and essentially instrumentalize the counterterrorism narrative. I mean, let's not imagine that instrumentalization works in only one direction. And I know that the concerns of those who work in peace building is always a fear of co-optation. But I think what was so powerful about the Secretary General's framing of the work against violent extremism was his exposition in a room full of some 60-plus leaders of states of very different characters, his characterization of the responsibilities of governments to citizens as a core element of what it means to prevent violent extremism. So there are different ways to think about which part of the debate is doing what to which other part of the debate. As we move, as Nancy quite rightly said, upstream to think about the earlier interventions and to think about how all of the actors, government, external funders, communities and citizens, civil society organizations, all have a particular sort of responsibility inside of opportunities vis-a-vis violent extremism. So A, I think that when we talk about prevention, we are on the most solid ground. But whether you want to think about governance or not as part of the prevention equation, I see the preventing violent extremism conversation as being a huge opening for the stakeholders within a society to talk about governance in a way that is related to a security conversation that governments are very accustomed to engaging in. And so in very important ways, the preventing violent extremism conversation leverages our ability to talk about governance in ways that might not be possible or heard otherwise. And so again, I think it's just a huge, huge opportunity. And I think that this lexicon question will be not settled by ever, but I think that as the UN releases its new approach, I think that will be a very useful touch point for a universalization of what we mean in this vocabulary. Because whatever we do or say within the U.S. government will be A, one microcosm, B, bureaucratically derived and not necessarily coming from a free form space in which one can start with the language that you wish. But I think it's also sort of besides the point as we move toward global partnerships in thinking about what it means to go upstream on the violent extremism challenge. And thank you very much for setting out that framework, Sarah, because one complaint that the peacebuilding community has had about the CBE discussion to date is a certain over focus at the community level. And of course, we believe that's critically important, but it sometimes lets governments off the hook on issues like corruption, which are such drivers of conflict. And so you're saying about how there used to be that dialogue between the local, the governmental levels, and then the global level is critically important and something that I'm not sure our field does as well as some other fields like global health, where those kinds of different levels are engaged much more easily with each other. Well, if I could switch gears for a moment and ask you to imagine this whole audience as a group of kindergartners, if you could give them some advice about what they could do in their lives to become peacebuilders and to play a role in this world that's changing so quickly, what advice would you give them? Use your words. I do think that is certainly where it would start. And one of the things that USIP really focuses on is bringing people together who might not otherwise have a chance to sit down together. And so it's engaging in conversation, have the conversation with that bully across the room and find common ground and find a way to move forward. I believe that fundamental to a lot of good peacebuilding is the understanding of how to do that and of the importance to do that. And that if you move to violence, you probably aren't going to solve whatever the problem was. I think that's a key point because as we see the next generation, which is so much in a technological bubble, where you get very easy to have your own views reinforced, I think we're losing a very basic skill of how you talk with people who are different from yourself, which is one of the key elements of the DNA of peacebuilding. I agree so much with what Nancy just said and I think it relates to my admonition to all of you that I hope you will enter into what you may label as security space because I think that the divide between those who do security and those who do peace is a really dangerous one because I think that at the end they're so integrally connected and that some of the biggest challenges to peace are in the way that the security debate is framed and that only if you enter into that debate and you listen hard as Nancy suggested, can you begin to find ways where you have those common interests that you can work toward. And I have always found in my work on civilian protection that the strongest arguments, not the only arguments, but the strongest arguments for those who hold a strong security frame, as their point of reference, is to talk about the security self-interest in changed behavior. And that requires engagement and that requires engagement with actors that you may see as being the problem, but if we don't engage on that question, who will? So you've touched on this, both of you, in your remarks about the necessity of reaching across different fields. In your own career, Sarah, in human rights, and traditionally there's been a little bit of friction between the human rights community and the conflict resolution community, how do both of you, in a very concrete way, work with fields that have different terminologies, different frameworks? I mean, how do you start to be the worker bee cross-fertilizing them? Do you have tricks of the trade or insights you could share with us? I think fundamental to the whole peace building field is the understanding of how to look across the various divides.  I look at the dialogue that's happened over the last few, I don't know, is it almost a decade, about framing it as human security and as an effort to reach into the hard security and all these other fields. Similar to Sarah, when I was in government had a bureau at USAID that had nine marquee brands. And, you know, what is quickly, quickly apparent is that you've got to bring these specialties together. And I have in the past used the story of bringing my elderly father to Mayo Clinic after having seen specialist who isn't ever really able to understand what the problem is. You go to Mayo Clinic and you have a team that's working together to do a diagnosis of the overall system. And it's when we're able to bring these various expertise together to better understand inside of a system what the issues are and how to move forward that we get better traction. And, you know, inside the government it is filled with, and outside the government, all of us end up specializing more and more and more and working inside systems that are further divided from the other specialties. And we just are not going to have the impact that we need. We're not going to understand the complexities that exist in a particular conflict that doesn't so helpfully divide itself up by the specialties that we have. So I think this is one of the biggest challenges that we have going forward on both the bureaucratic front, on the diagnosis front, and thinking about it in a systems way, and understanding how to address complexity and get to the other side of that with the kind of actions that will have an impact. I think the will is there if we take care of models. So how do we incentivize that kind of in systemic engagement within these very complex bureaucracies? Money is a really good incentive. And that's part of the reason why I have been talking about the value of having flexible funding for atrocity prevention or funding for preventing violent extremism that requires people to argue how they're going to work together to achieve a result. Because there's nothing... The fundamental way to get people to work together is to get them to all work collectively on a problem that they all care about. And if you're problem focused as opposed to turf focused or terminology focused or paradigm focused or whatever focused, problem focused, all things become possible. One of the best ways to get people to be focused on a common problem is to have a pot of money that's dedicated to the problem. And then it just changes the fundamentals of how you come together. And that's me speaking through a bureaucratic lens. But I think it's one of the least appreciated but most powerful elements of what Congress can do as it looks to fund in sort of national security, foreign policy development objectives is to articulate the kinds of results that it wants to see instead of deciding sort of which pieces that it thinks it wants to privilege. Because to Nancy's point there are a variety of tools that can play to a problem set. And you don't know until you deeply understand the problem set which are going to be most opposite for that particular case. So that's how I think you do incentives is with money. That also speaks though to a role that NGOs could play in supporting the budgets and the flexible funds that would then make that kind of joint action possible. So we can talk more about that. I want to open the floor to questions in just a moment, but I had to ask a final question. It is not lost on me that we're three women leading different kinds of peace building organizations. And I wonder if you could say a role if you could say a word about the role you see in women in peace building, but also a potential problem that I've been seeing just in informal research in Washington. So I went to American University and was giving a couple of lectures and as a guest in classes. And the course that was basics of peace building was 27 women and one man. And in the course that was security in a modern world, it was reversed. And so are we facing a gender issue in the peace building security field? And also what are the bright spots you see about working on women in peace building internationally? I think your illustration goes to Sarah's point about how to talk in the security, the so-called security world. And at our peril, do we come up with a division along the lines of gender that addresses so-called soft peace building over here and hard security over here with gender lines. So that's a very good cautionary illustration. It also speaks to the earlier point we were talking about on the how vital it is to bring these pieces together and to see security in a broader frame and discuss more broadly. I think the, you know, there are different ways in which women are socialized traditionally. I think the question will be going forward in a world where people have maybe more conscious understandings of the gendered way in which we work that might shift. But we still, I know at USIP there's a lot of attention paid to making sure that we bring men into the conversation about how to address women's rights and women's roles and that it does have to be everyone at the table to get guidance. Well, I'll wait to hear more guidance and we'll continue with Q&A. We have mics up here. Oh, so we're going to be passing mics around. So maybe we'll cluster questions. I know that a lot of people want to have direct input. So hands with questions. Yes, I see Howard and Peter. Why don't we start with both of you and I'll keep scanning. Thank you. I've been interested for a long time, because I had to deal with it on the ground for a long time, in the relationship between state and USAID and defense on the ground, which is a different story from what we read in the QDDR, which since I'm retired I don't have to read anymore. But I'm particularly interested, Sarah, in what you were saying about getting the State Department and embassies more focused on community building, which always I saw, because I'm a USAID person, as a USAID responsibility, and I never saw the skills or the incentives or the interest among State Department people for really getting at the community level in a constructive and programmatic way. And I wonder if you're trying to accomplish that, or what you're trying to do is sensitize at a sort of higher level so that on the ground, state and USAID programs can be much more complimentary than they sometimes are. Thank you. Thank you. Peter. Thank you. My name is Peter Dixon with an organization called Concordes International, not American. But we bring people together who might otherwise be shooting at each other. And my question relates to the security and peace fields and how they do or don't connect with each other, because I'd just like to ask how you think the constraints and the targeting of so-called material support. Thank you. Fred Tipson, a proud alumnus of the Institute of Peace. Kudos to all three of you for leading the fight of making this about holistic approaches to specific contexts and solving problems in a very localized and holistic way. Is this a mic on? Sorry. I'm struck, however, by the fact that our efforts at prevention seem to be disregarding the increasing scale of the problem that we're facing, the increasing scale of the stresses that are generating violence in various parts of the world. So our challenge to talk about preventing much of this violence is probably becoming increasingly unrealistic. The growing number of young men who have no prospects in life, these underlying causes of violent extremism, livelihoods, degree of government, legitimacy, and so forth that are being exploited by leaders but have underlying causes that are not resolvable. And I just wonder how you think about this, and I'm talking about climate volatility, population growth, things that we probably cannot change in the short term, but which will lead to much greater stress in societies from Pakistan to Nigeria to Egypt, etc. The business of peace building can't be the quaint reference to small scale, national only discussion of issues. Somehow we're, I don't seem, we're not coping with the broader range of what's going on in the world that's generating the kinds of conflicts that are going to only get worse in my opinion. Okay, well thank you. Three questions that could really be the focus of three conferences. Exactly. One on how to get the State Department emphases better focused on community. One on the material support question, and are we constraining peace builders from talking with the people they need to be talking with. And then the scale of the problem. Sarah, would you like to start? So the response to the question about communities is that I do see political officers as moving beyond, in the field, moving beyond the question of going to visit the detained human rights activists to learning more about what's going on with communities and who are their leaders, what are their leadership networks, what are their main concerns, how are their views represented or not to local or national government. When I was in Kenya, we traveled, Lee and I traveled out to Mombasa and with a young political officer who spent his time talking to community leaders in Mombasa. Religious community leaders, you know, local neighborhood community leaders, civil society leaders had a forum in which he regularly engaged in dialogue with them. And so I think that communities are increasingly recognized as a focal point for political work and understanding and assessment. And it will vary, I'm sure, by the capacity of the post and the accessibility of the communities. But I think what's really important, and this pertains especially to my personal view of how we think about preventing violent extremism, and it relates also to the third question about macro causality versus micro manifestation of inequality or injustice, which is that violent extremism does not, it's not sort of a blanket that washes over the world in one fell swoop. It's something that works through seams and weaknesses and vulnerabilities. And so the prevention work, as it looks, as we look at terrorist networks and we look at where they're currently strongest, the hot zones with conflict or safe haven of terrorists, and you look then about how they spread out to buffer and periphery zones. If you start at the periphery, again to Nancy's point about as upstream as you can go, places that are at risk but are still very permissive environments, but where you can trace the vulnerable networks, those communities that are most likely GP targeted by extremist organizations that are operating next over, you can identify where the most important vulnerabilities are. And those are communities really worth investing in in terms of understanding and in terms of supporting. So my view about how we as an international community look at the threat of violent extremism is not that we need to turn the entire globe into Marine County in order to combat violent extremism, is that as we can predictably understand where some of the biggest vulnerabilities lie, where some of the populations are most vulnerable, and that is where we need to concentrate our effort. Because we don't have, to the point of the third question, the resources to fix everything right now. If we did, we wouldn't. So I think communities are increasingly important, but I think they have different degrees of importance in different contexts. And I think they're particularly important for us to understand and work with and reinforce in the context of the violent extremism challenge. On material support, I think there are often untoward consequences of public policy decisions. And I think there is no question that I have heard from many organizations that the material support prohibitions do have, do create challenges for peacebuilding organizations, particularly when they want to work with those that are closest to the problem set on the violent extremism problem set. So I would acknowledge that that, I've certainly heard that that is a serious issue. On the final question about underlying, about the big sort of tectonic pressure points that are increasing the potential for vulnerability and inequity and violence, absolutely no one actor has enough resources to deal with them. And we could get into a long discussion about the international system and the limits of the UN and why, you know, this is my view about why it's so important to involve the private sector in discussions about preventing violent extremism when you're looking at, you know, assistance budgets that are just a minuscule portion of the foreign direct investment value in many of these countries that are most at risk. So there's no question that no one entity can do it all, that we need everyone engaged and that, and that while the, neither the US government nor the international community has enough sort of resources and energy against any single one of these thematic threats, whether it's climate change or inequality, that you can't do everything at once. And so you have to make choices. And so to my mind, the prevention agenda then needs to become more specific. That's why, to my mind, the prevention agenda is not the development agenda. The prevention agenda is very distinct from the development agenda and development tools have a real role to play in prevention once you know what it is that you're trying to prevent. If you're trying to prevent mass atrocities against civilians, if you're trying to prevent the spread of violent extremism, you need to look at the risk factors for those activities and you need to concentrate your development and your peace building efforts in those areas. So to me, it's not a question of do you do development or you do do you do conflict prevention. It's if you're going to do a certain kind of prevention, where are you doing it? With whom are you doing it?  Thank you. Nancy, do you want to take any or all of those? So let me just make a few specific points to compliment that. The first on the state aid conversation, I would just add that I was very happy to see the QDDR take on this issue of taking more risk because none of this work can be done as long as our diplomat and development professionals cannot leave the the embassy or the the aid mission. And so we need to unleash our government officials so that they can get outside and do that work. It's very important to have all the NGO partners and all all the other actors doing that work but the more that we keep our our official Americans locked up inside the worst that will be for us as a country. So that's absolutely critical. On on the material support I absolutely agree. I think it over and over again it becomes a significant problem both for peace building and for humanitarian work and we need to find more nuanced ways, more carve outs, you know, more more ways of making that help without also being a hindrance, without canceling out other efforts that are absolutely critical and I believe that's an important piece of work. On the on the scale issue, Fred, absolutely, Sarita, everything that you said, I would also add that this is why there is such an effort on global partnerships and I would say a part of those global partnerships are actually the creation of these, you know, or the further solidifying critical norms around state behavior and expectations and how much of this, much of the violence that we're seeing is fueled by or prompted by the kind of grievances that stem from corruption, from inequality, from basically fragility at the state level and so we had a wonderful group of African women leaders here earlier this week, parliamentarians, ministers, et cetera and they were they were furious with the lack of leadership at the very top of their countries and the inability of the UN to make a difference on these issues and they're ready to mount, you know, a walk across Africa or something, some kind of mass action to really underscore that it's not okay for leadership to continue on the way it is and so I think it's both creating a greater understanding of this normative action and, you know, there is a lot, especially augmented by digital media, there's a lot of energy for people to have it be differently and it's harnessing and supporting and enabling that to happen which will be a part of the equation and everyone is different, every conflict, every seam is different and so at our peril do we apply mass solutions. Some more questions? Yes, up here and then Chick. Hi, I'm Kim Hart with Search for Common Ground. I wanted to build on your comments about increasing collaboration by having problem focused funding. I think that's really accurate and it's a big challenge here in DC as we all know with accounts like the complex crises fund getting zeroed out every year and some of these really critical global accounts that do fund this type of work. So I just wanted to hear a little bit more about how your teams are building that with the hill, looking forward, and how our community can help. Thanks, Chick. Hi, thank you. It's so good to be here and Nancy, it's so good to see you in that chair. We appreciate it very much. My biggest concern overall is one that we've referred to a couple times in terms of scale and scale means resources, it means money for the institutions that are engaged in violence prevention and peace building. The organizations and bureaus that you represent are doing extraordinary work but so incredibly under-resourced in comparison with virtually everything else that goes on in the U.S. government and as you all know it wasn't very long ago that we went through a real struggle just to keep this institution alive, let alone be being adequately funded. Part of the challenge in getting particularly the Congress to even pay attention to these institutions and what you're doing is a lack of confidence in the efficacy of peace building, a lack of confidence that we can actually that you actually can do it, that it can make a difference. What can messages do you take to the American public and to the Congress? What message would you encourage us to take to the people we connect with and in our advocacy efforts on behalf of what you're doing to help strengthen the case, to get the case out there and to begin to scale up the financial resources that make it possible for all of us to do what we're trying to do. Thank you. Good, thank you. I've just gotten the word that we have three minutes so maybe we can use that opportunity both to answer the questions and to wrap up with any other comments you'd like. Sure, thanks Mon. The conversation about resources is one in which I think the administration has, the Obama administration has talked about the importance of funding foreign assistance and it does seem to be an issue that the hill has a different perspective on and that is not historically an aberration and so this is a long-term challenge that we've had exacerbated by the facts that you all know that you know most Americans are under the false impression that we spent oodles of money on foreign aid when of course we spend an embarrassingly low on the amount when compared to other developed countries and so I don't have a silver bullet on that. I think we have in seeking to talk about the importance of prevention within the State Department we are trying to highlight the fact that when everything that we do is committed to in a specific line item for a very specific purpose that is divided up by by sort of bureaucratic budget-driven process it just becomes hard to stay focused on the the integrated problems you know we can have and this relates to the second question on on metrics you know the hill has said very positive things about our HIV AIDS program in large part because the results are so easy to measure and you know this is this is like you know we focus on the crisis because it's here we don't focus on prevention because it's not here yet and you know we focus on the things that we can measure the results of even if there may be not the only things that are important and so the challenge to just build now into the answer to the response to the second question is to be able to articulate the value if not demonstrate the value of prevention work or of peace-building work it's a huge challenge for the atrocity prevention work that I mentioned because how do you show the results of a non-barking dog first of all in the case of Burundi that I offered up as an example nobody wants to crow about Burundi because we're very worried about Burundi right so how do you take credit for two years worth of investment that you believe has helped to prepare us better and helped to prevent violence when violence could emerge at any moment right so that's that's tough in and of itself but the non-barking dog which is to say whether it's the Nigeria elections or whether it's the Kenya elections where we believe that our efforts diplomatic and programmatic we're very important contributors to the lack of a result that we feared that's just a very hard case to make and so I don't have a great answer to that I do think that that it is a chronic liability for the way we we do our foreign policy budgeting so first of all and just very quickly the complex crisis fund from my old seat is one of the most important otherwise unencumbered funds that there is to Sarah's point about the budgeting process it's really important that there be the kind of funding that enable a faster response to an unanticipated crisis not to not to undercut the upstream efforts but you do want to have that flexibility I would note you know this measurement issue is something that is always a struggle and in fact you may want to mention the lunch today Melanie on that but you know the causality will remain a challenge I believe there is a very strong argument that must continue to be made about the fact that the more we we focus on getting ahead of problems it's more cost-effective than doing massive responses either to a natural disaster or to a war in a conflict where you have to resort to military means it is definitely in our national security interest to try to prevent conflict from happening and it's a very very at the in the scale of things investment to make in that effort and it's certainly in line with our values as a country and the more we do it in partnership with frameworks and with networks where we are collectively working on a problem and not so worried about the particular causality of one act or another but more how are we achieving the the desired outcome of of peace and stability the better off we are in getting around some of the complexities of of measuring and if you look at some of the shifts that are on the table for the post-millennium development goals for the sustainable development goals it is just imperative that we have goal 16 in there which is the heartbeat of bringing together democracy with peace building and that will provide a global framework with indicators that all of us can feed into and I I think that will be that plus frameworks like the New Deal for Engagement with Fragile States where you have negotiated frameworks that a number of actors are feeding into at a very local level we need to be alert for those opportunities we need to be rigorous with our own efforts and partner with others in frameworks that enable us to really understand progress and it will take that kind of concerted effort to get us where we want to be as this ever interconnected interdependent globe on that note thanks to both of you so much for a fascinating discussion actually after the next panel have more information about our lunch which indeed for those of you who are interested will focus on all the questions you wanted to ask about negotiation we will have a 20 minute 15 to 20 minute break listen for the gongs or am I supposed to be oh Linwood yes sorry it's behind me Linwood will tell us everything we need to know thank you thank you Melanie and Sarah and Nancy for this wonderful discussion and thank you for participating in that discussion as Melanie has said well we're on break now for approximately 20 minutes we'll return to Carlucci and we'll have a discussion with our first panel talking about the the the challenge and the threat of silencing of voices and that will be kicked off by framing remarks by Rosario to chief from USAID thank you very much I hope you all got some caffeine I think we're operating in what we sometimes call peace building standard time which is about 10 minutes behind everything else so welcome back I'm absolutely delighted to very briefly introduce the next panel which talks about the shrinking of civil society's space and as you heard this morning from Nancy and from Sarah in order to connect with communities there has to be a vibrant civil society that can speak back and one very troubling and disheartening trend that we're seeing around the world are rules which make it impossible or illegal or even fatal for civil society actors whether they're religious secular around particular issues around capacity building to come together and build the kind of social cohesion that we need to build peace so if you look around the world Russia Central Asia parts of Africa one of the strangest saddest most Freudian examples I can think of this is that South Sudan so recently independent of Sudan has initiated a very restrictive civil society law modeled on Sudan's so it's a great pleasure that I introduce Rosary Tucci who will be introducing today's panel and Rosary was recently appointed the Deputy Director of the Center of Excellence on Democracy Human Rights and Governance at USAID and for those of you who might not be familiar with the center it contributes to the Dodger Bureau's efforts to prevent crises and further political transitions by working to strengthen new and effective democratic institutions and enabling peaceful political transitions so Rosary welcome we're delighted that you're here so first let me thank USIP and the Alliance for Peace Building for making closed space a core part of this week's conference my role this morning is to first frame the discussion for the panelists and conveniently dodge the difficult questions we'll leave those for the expert panelists and second to share just how serious the US government is responding to the backsliding on democracy starting at the very top and here you'll see in the president's own words when citizens are free to organize and work together across borders to make communities healthier our environment cleaner and the world safer that's when real change happens so to frame the discussion I'll talk today about the changing political landscape the changing role of civil society and the impact that closing space is having on civil society and then finally the importance of responding and how we are responding to these changing dynamics in the US government so first I'd like to draw your attention to the screen a few facts on the screen about the changing political landscape not to be too dramatic but a bleak picture becomes more somber since last year we've been quoting the 50 laws were proposed that restricts space for civil society with 20 enacted unfortunately when we dive a little bit deeper we see that in the past three years 117 laws have been proposed with 74 enacted and so across the board these laws are curtailing the freedom of assembly association and expression whether it's a proposed law in Cambodia that's happening right now it's being proposed right now that severely restricts the activities of civil society organizations or the recently passed law in Uganda I think it was just in March that grants the NGO board broad powers to refuse registration to NGOs or even worse a series of restrictive laws and the best case example of that is in Russia over the past decade starting with a 2006 2006 NGO law that introduced difficult to meet reporting requirements for NGOs and then again in 2012 we've got a requirement that organizations must register as foreign agents I think most of you are familiar with that law and a number of laws in between so this rising tide of restrictions is shrinking civil society space but it really as many of you know it cuts at the very fabric of democracy civil society exists to ensure that people's voices are heard felt and most important manifested so Melanie used the word disheartening and it's exactly the word I was going to use it's disheartening to see this trend particularly after the democratization era of the 1990s but I think we can say that the challenges that we are seeing unfolding today are because civil society organizations have been so successful and they're perceived as a threat and again we have a quote from the president it's precisely because citizen and civil society can be so powerful that more and more governments are doing everything they can to silence them I'm going to move now into the role of civil society and just give you a little bit of the flavor of the changing roles that civil society is playing in its most traditional fashion it's our long-standing media partners for instance in Ukraine who were speaking out for freedom in the Maidan holding the government accountable for his actions we are also pleased now to be supporting civil society organizations who are actually partnering with government we see this example in the feed the future initiative where jointly civil society and government are coming together to create metrics to create messages and to come up with solutions to food and security and interestingly enough I was going to raise the example of our support for civil society organizations in Burundi to support youth-led organizations to reduce the risk of violence before the elections next month we'll remain hopeful that there's a positive and peaceful outcome but as this morning's event show that remains to be seen but as these roles evolve we must help civil society organizations adjust to the change the changing operating environment particularly in closed space for instance i'll give two quick examples we know that the source of funding for CSOs is changing right so CSOs can't really rely on the same levels of ODA development assistance that they once were receiving now this is particularly acute in closing space because when you have further restrictions on receiving foreign funding it makes it even more difficult for organizations the second example i like to give is around the new technologies that are evolving every single day while civil society organizations can count on these technologies to help broaden their base and reach out to more people unfortunately they can also count on unfriendly actors to be one step ahead of them enthroning their actions and this is what's creating a whole new set of challenge we call digital security challenges so that's something we're looking into so given this context why do we have a responsibility to push back on the pushback i think that's a common phrase that people are starting to use but i would say that that this is obvious to many of you but if we lose a functionality of civil society who will be applying the critical accountability measures who will ensure that the government doesn't lose touch with the concerns and the needs of the people and who will ensure that those typically excluded from the dialogue are part of the discussion um i don't know for any of you who might know the former deputy administrator of USAID don steinberg i'm going to channel my inner don right now um he never made remarks without mentioning those typically excluded so women youth internally displays people lgbt and indigenous populations i think that's a good precedent to set so i'm following in his footsteps the other reason we have to respond and it was raised um this morning as well neighboring countries will continue to take notes we saw south sudan shockingly taking notes from sudan um and they're pushing the boundaries of the restrictions that they can apply in their own countries the u.s government has put forth a robust agenda to combat this backsliding it's what we call stand with civil society and this this agenda we call an agenda it was crystallized last june in a presidential memorandum if you guys are familiar with the presidential memorandum but basically what it says in very general terms i'm going to pull it again from something nancy said this morning use your own words that's essentially what it's saying use your own words so for us representatives during our visits and our everyday business engage with civil society broadly and often each time we encounter a restrictive law speak up say something and take action continue to support civil society despite or in in light of the restrictions that are taking place and most importantly play that facilitator role between governments and civil society essentially model the type of change we are asking other governments to take i'm just gonna rift off of it's a little this is our stand with civil society and some additional quotes from president obama if we want to take a more practical long-term approach we know the political society space is expanding and contrasting at any moment in time so it's our job as academics policymakers and practitioners to figure out how we do three things this is how we're framing it prevent adapt and support civil society during these shifting times i'm most familiar with the foreign assistance but but the diplomatic efforts are equally as important in fact when we work together we can create a robust response hopefully capable of combating some of the most challenging environments i'm just going to give you two quick examples of some of the work that we're doing uh at usa id first to prevent further restrictions i'm just going to pull up this real quick we have a cso sustainability index and what this document does is it tracks trends uh seven civil society dimensions across 65 64 countries and this gives our civil society actors a tool that they can use in advocating for reform so this is one one way we are trying to prevent the restrictions a second thing that we're doing is called the lead program and this provides civil society organizations with legal analysis both long-term and rapid response legal analysis that they can use to mobilize action when a restrictive law is proposed and we are also trying to be innovative and using innovative approaches so we are currently right now creating what we call innovation hubs and these innovation hubs are designed to connect civil societies across regions and provide them with the expertise training resource and ict tools to better equip them in these closing space environments i'll also just give you two quick highlights of some work that's being done in what we call the diplomatic space we of course supporting the communities of democracy uh through by strengthening the diplomatic action and state department also has a program called lifeline which provides emergency assistance to cso's who are under threat sees as some of the tangible programs that we're doing um to help civil society organizations i'm gonna pick up one more document here we have one more document i will what good would i be if i didn't come with some handouts this is our best practices document we just recently released this in january and it's a short compilation of some of the best practices and how we can do program smarter but this is just a start we know we need the assistance from any of you to help figure out uh what are some more best practices uh and some of the questions that we've been asking um or how can we better connect civil society in closing spaces peer-to-peer learning across regions i mentioned the hubs but there's many more ways that we can do this and what are in general what are some of the tools that can we can use to help civil societies mobilize more effectively i'm going to leave these hard questions like i said to the panelists and i'm just going to leave you with one thought so this is our mission this is usa's mission statement and i raise this because it's really important to know that inclusive peaceful democracies are core to our development work poverty reduction economic growth democracy and national security are all intertwined and so we what i'm basically saying is we can't implement agriculture and global health programs without also addressing core democratic governance in human rights issues that are impeding states for providing services for their own people otherwise we risk either having a job that we have to do endlessly or worse yet we risk leaving millions of people unheard um and and uh neglected in the background but we have an opportunity in front of us and we really should take advantage of that opportunity so i'll leave it there and um we'll welcome our panelists thank you rosary for giving us the u.s. government perspective on this issue of the crisis of shrinking civil society space around the world i'd like to invite at this time our our next uh panelists uh george lopez from our academy vice president of the academy at us institute of peace will lead a discussion on the topic of silencing voices active space for civil society engagement is a foundation for sustainable peace however around the world there is an alarming trend toward government restrictions that are making an exceedingly difficult and more dangerous for conducting this work today we have before you a panel that will highlight the key issues and potential solutions for both peace building and democratic prince practitioners george linwood thank you and and thank you rosary for this marvelous introduction the overview of the u.s. government approach to this it is of course a very very complex and now compelling question with the closing of civil space and this panel is really a a fabulous one to kick off this discussion because of the diversity of experience of our of our panelists as you see we have four uh we we break tradition of the last panel we do have two men uh trying to be as inclusive as we can uh sir michael lee comes to us from the german marshal fund and with a a long history of involvement in the creation of civil space particularly in the transition from communist regimes in the late 80s and early 90s to now but also much more recent and pressing work in the ukraine situation so his remarks are going to be focused partly on on on that and in engaging this question uh tanya faffenholz is is for many of us one of the best scholar practitioner practitioner research scholars in the field basing her work of course out of the graduate institute in geneva she's deeply involved in in two particular projects one which addresses the core of our of our program this morning on the the widening of civil society space and how that can be done with engagement across cases and across groups but also a broader look at the inclusion and inclusive dimensions and challenges of the peace building enterprise uh maria stefan is my good colleague as a senior policy fellow here at the united states institute of peace many of you know maria from her work with her colleague erica chenneweth on on proving empirically to us that nonviolent transition and nonviolent civic engagement movements of protest are more likely to change regimes towards democracy and towards transition than violent ones are but she's also been very active in the transnational space of civic mobilization and its importance in in what we do not only for peace building but for linking peace building and democracy commissa kamara joins us as a well-known specialist and senior program officer from the national endowment for democracy with particular emphasis on programs in west africa the creation and maintenance of the sahal strategy forum and with a good deal of case experience as well so we have a marvelous and rich program i've invited the panelists as they feel comfortable to either speak from this television interview newsroom style or to come to the podium so we thank you for your attendance each of our panelists has been very disciplined and trying to bring their remarks within seven to ten minutes which only touches the kind of work they've done but it ought to give us good basis for discussion we'll begin with sir michael thank you very much for that introduction george and for the invitation to be with you today i want to share with you the experience i have had at the european commission in brussels over many many years working with the former communist countries in central and eastern europe and then also working with a further group of countries to the east and to the south around the mediterranean rim the particular feature of this work and why i think it might be of interest at the start of our discussion is it's virtually a unique case in which a group of countries authorized as it were an outside authority to intervene directly within their societies to support transition towards democracy as they were candidates for membership so the legitimacy of this intervention came from the demand within the countries themselves it's very rare to find this around the world and as we heard in the introduction this morning uh the space is closing with countries that do not have this kind of very strong incentive however i do also have a rather somber message in that even with the tremendous incentives that the european union was able to put forward in the form of membership financial support and other means what we see these days is considerable backsliding even in this particular case the european union is very aware that the criteria for membership including democracy rule of law protection of human rights means democracy not only in the narrow sense of electoral democracy but in the much more profound sense of liberal democracy touching the whole of society and yet here we are a decade or so after the dramatic enlargement to 10 and then 12 new member states 10 of them from central and eastern europe former communist countries we actually have one of these countries hungary which was at the forefront of the transition in the early days whose prime minister is declaring his personal opposition to liberal democracy and his preference for another approach so this is even in the case of a country that has had all these benefits that is a member of the european union and of nato how much more difficult therefore might it be with countries that don't have this very strong structure of support and of incentives early on in the transition process the european commission identified civil society as crucial to back up this transition process and support for membership and established a well-financed civil society facility providing three main types of support support on the necessary legislation to permit the activities of civil society in countries where civil society had been crushed for two or three generations and in some cases where it had been rather weak even before the advent of communism financial support to shore up such organizations and then people to people programs to bring them into contact with counterparts in older member states with a view to sharing best practice and building up partnerships this was particularly necessary because of the many many challenges these societies faced the traditions of the rule of law were weak corruption was and is a major problem some of the issues that we rather take for granted in western societies related to non-discrimination gender equality protection of the environment were all very new to these countries stepping back from all this i think one can say 10 or 11 years later that on the whole this process has been successful and we do see in most of the countries concerned thriving civil societies and democracy that is not seriously at threat but we also see negative tendencies the persistence of of corruption and even the calling into question of the notion of liberal democracy itself the european commissioners found that as long as these countries had not yet assigned their act of accession and there was still a doubt as to whether or not they were going to succeed in the process we had maximum leverage but as soon as this process was complete and they were on their own we saw very diverse trends including serious backsliding now if this was true in the countries with this very strong incentive how much more true was it with the next ring of countries around the european union covered by our so-called neighborhood policy where we have tried to strengthen democracy and respect for the rule of law and human rights but without the incentive of eventual membership and there the experience is is far more mixed as anyone who reads the newspapers every day every day knows in the case of eastern europe moderate progress has been registered we saw in the introduction there's pictures of the maydan which to some extent are encouraging but we know also that the overthrow of the ancien regime in ukraine has unleashed other forces not all of whom are liberal but looking more generally across the southern caucuses north africa and the levant these days it's perhaps only tunisia and even there with a question mark where we see strong local ownership of this process and this really brings me to the abiding conclusion that we have reached as a result of this experience and that is that outside actors certainly can support can share experience can build alliances can bring counterparts into contact can launch education programs involve young people mobilize diplomatic pressure but the indispensable ingredient for success in this effort is a strong demand arising from within the target country as it were itself let me just read you a brief paragraph of conclusions from a recent analysis that the commission has made based on its experience ever since the overthrow of communism and with a view to financing support for civil society activities over the next seven years this very short quote is as follows the commission recognizes that a genuine culture of active citizenship cannot be created with financial assistance from the outside alone external donors may over influence civil society activities organizations that are excessively dependent on international domestic public funding can in some instances hardly be considered genuine civil society and risk delegitimizing their activities in the eyes of the public the conclusion drawn from this is not that this activity should be stopped on the contrary but that what we should do perhaps is double and quadruple our support in the case of those societies where there is a clear demand welling up from within the society in other cases we should do our best but also with some modesty based on experience and with the understanding that the key actors must come from within the societies concerned themselves thank you thank you thank you George thank you Melanie and the Alliance and the Institute for inviting me it's a pleasure to be here and I have three issues to talk about and that is a look first a little bit at what are the different dimensions of this shrinking space then what are the challenges within civil society itself and then what are the strategies in civil society support different dimensions of shrinking space we have heard already the legal space I don't have to add anything to that dramatic I wanted to highlight the physical space also I mean what we see and we have heard in the previous panel about violent extremism that's an extreme shrinking space for active civil society groups when we hear reports at the human rights council in Geneva for example about groups in Syria under ISIS controlled areas how the space shrinks I mean that's you can imagine so this annex the violence from all sides that are committed are like extreme shrinking of the space and I think that's that's a crucial problem in civil society support so it's not about when we talk about strategies it's not just about the best way to support it's really about also to address violence and protection issues and I think sometimes the peace building community is not good at protection issues so we support our partners but do we protect them are they still alive tomorrow to gain to benefit from training that has been conducted the other dimension is dividing and co-option strategies by governments and we see that all around the world it's not that civil society is that good entity it's just waiting for our brilliant support all the time civil society is as divided as society and there are elements in society in civil society that are co-opted by governments and of course we tend to work with the others but we shouldn't ignore that and that's going on and it's deliberate strategies by governments to do that I wanted to talk about a particular sort of resistance issue that is going on and we saw that in our latest data multi-year project on broader inclusion as Michael mentioned with 40 in-depth case studies and all across these case studies what we have seen is that governments are extremely good at resistance for change it's not only resistance in civil society so we have the obvious resistance we heard about physical space legal space but there are soft resistance and I wanted to highlight an example the undersecretary was talking about Kenya let me take the Kenyan example great success violence has been absolutely reduced during the elections which is a great success but it doesn't stop here the story of Kenya but it stops in terms of monitoring and attention and that's the problem what has happened since this nonviolent election is that we see a systematic revision of the gains of the peace deal we see commissions that have been explicitly set up in order to reduce the causes of violence like the national integration commission in Kenya that are the commissioners are not renewed and when the commissioners were renewed you will find all the friends of the president there you have all power status nominated by only one ethnic community but the interesting thing to all these things the constitution that has had tremendous gains addressing the causes of conflict the best constitution the country ever had it has been amended 10 or 12 times already to remake the gains of the peace process nobody says anything not in civil society not in the international community there's no monitoring we're all happy that the violence was not there during election and we have have done well in prevention is that enough so I think we should take a second look and be more careful um I might sound a bit critical I thought as another American and not getting an American funding I can play that role today so let me continue and it's becoming even worse now okay let's look at number three shrinking space and that's ourselves so I argue that the peace building community right large is contributing to shrinking space of civil society and I tell you why I'm also a member of alliance for peace building evaluation peace building aviation consortium and we had interesting debates on Monday how come that we are still talking we see this here we're talking about prevention we're talking about linking security and development we're talking about counterterrorism I'm in this field since 25 years I have heard it all talked about that in the early 90s we talked to the mid 90s we talked about it after September 11 and we have spent enormous amounts of money and resources into research into evaluations into all that we know a lot we're not just starting from scratch but it seems we always do and the consequences for civil society are that they have to go with the flow now they have to rewrite their project proposals from resistance to service delivery to anti-terror and they're just there to report and report and rewrite and rewrite and their space for action is shrinking and it's because of us just wanted to highlight that um let me see whether I have also I'm gonna have some positive things as well don't worry but let me start on the challenges women's civil society I think we in the peace building community are right to support civil society and to support the peace constituencies that's our role and we should do that but we should not be ignorant of the rest there there's so much research on the NGOization of civil society that goes on and we see that in every crisis going on you mentioned Ukraine we see that again in in Ukraine that we have a shift from advocacy work to service delivery work we have a shift of gender roles where uh human rights uh women organizations become now the protectors of the man going to war because the narratives change and the gender roles change because of war we have a lack of strategic vision in many civil society organizations we've been working in Geneva a lot on the process in Libya and Syria for example because UN has offices there and you will see that all the civil society organizations coming to Geneva and all the UN agencies engaging there's a lack of a vision what to exactly support and civil society itself has a lack of vision but what is done is negotiation training leadership skills training conflict resolution training but where is the strategic advice strategic support to organizations um and making them fit for resistance let's put it like that um on the Libya case just one example again the UN has tried to set up a very inclusive process with parallel tracks with the main negotiations with a civil society track a women track all these tracks are totally independent from each other and we know that this has absolutely no effect but it's still happening it's still going on we have all this knowledge so um what do we do with all this there's still hope um of course there are very many good organizations out there and i have been also working for the european commission in my previous life and as a donor i mean one thing i have learned is don't bombard organizations that are good with too much money because then they can't be good anymore they need money of course they need support but i think what is a clear problem in the peaceful in community is that we live in the silos and we tend to talk to our like-minded our like-minded here our like-minded i had often the impression how can that we have still problems in the world everybody i talked to is totally convinced of inclusion of anti-terror of i can't understand it so it's a problem with whom i'm talking to apparently and i think that's what happening we're talking to ourselves and we're very happy among ourselves and our like-minded friends are brought everywhere so that's a crucial problem and another problem is this disconnect between the program and project work and the political work and civil society support work if you want to help shrinking a sort of opening space for civil society it's not enough to do a nice project we know that these all this has to come together and all this has sort of double strategies we need the international NGOs that lobby their governments to push support to other governments and we should not just be too much in our comfort zone and say like well there's these nice governments we are having these deals and partnership agreements it's i mean let's face it there's one word that the peace community doesn't really like and that's power but let's face it when we talk about why is space shrinking it's because nobody wants to give up power easily and i mean who would so there's not enough strategies around in civil society both locally and with international supporters to counteract elite power and all sorts of powers and resistance within and outside of civil society and i think we should really address that issue and build it into the programs and strategies we have for the kenyan example i mentioned many human rights groups in kenya said if we would have only worked with parliament we didn't understand that parliament could change actually the laws we had lobbied for and so there is this multi-layer strategies necessary and i know we're talking about this joint strategizing and all this but i think every organization has to really understand which part of the puzzle they are contributing to and we really need for ones work on the blockages so two more last points one is monitoring what is really crucial what i've seen in so many countries now and also our research confirms that monitoring is really key and monitoring mainly takes place on human rights monitoring that is not enough we need to systematically monitor the gains that have been there when we supported our partners we have to monitor whether the gains that have made are still in place and out of from that monitoring and that data that is there there needs to be systematic advocacy campaigns and the support can then be channeled more directly and much more targeted the last point i would like to make is instead of reinventing the wheel all the time i think we should really work on the question of the blockages why are we having brilliant conflict analysis but programming looks the same why do we talk every 10 years about the same thing but nothing changes so we know all this what are the main blockages within our institutions within civil society within governments that hold us sort of that prevent us from doing what should be done and what we are verbally all the time claiming to do and i think that should be an engagement of the peacebuilding community to really list these blockages and come up with a compact of commitment to work on these blockages and with that i leave you thank you very much thank you Tanya Maria well thanks very much George thanks Tanya for that nice and feisty setup for my remarks very nice i'd first like to offer a shout out to Melanie and the organizers for making governance the focus of this year's conference i think we know that bad governance systemic corruption is a major driver of violent conflict and certainly violent extremism around the world so it's wonderful that the premier peacebuilding organization is taking governance onborn in such a serious way in addition i would say that the closing space for civil society is i think an underappreciated threat to international peace insecurity for all the reasons that my colleagues laid out and i'm grateful that this issue is being taken more seriously not only in this town but certainly internationally um we're fortunate at this point to have some excellent research i'll wear my academic cap for a second we're fortunate to have some excellent research that has been done on this phenomenon of closing space for civil society and on authoritarian pushback and i would just mention a few the great work by tom carothers and diane gourmand at the carnady endowment for international peace who focused on this phenomenon civicus the global civil society network has a great enabling environment index that's been very helpful the international center for not for profit law which is focused more on the legal enabling environment and my old professor sarah mendelson has just done some work from the csis on why governments target civil society and what can be done in response um so we're fortunate to have that research out there now and the reality is that there's actually a skill set involved in closing space for civil society just as there's a skill set involved in waging civil resistance and nonviolent movements governments basically are learning from each other how to do this um and one people are starting to talk about a dictator's playbook so there are certain techniques and tactics that governments are using to shut down the space for civil society whether it's finding ways to criminalize uh descent whether it's um proactively using state-run media to perpetuate foreign conspiracy theories whether it's outsourcing violent repression to non-state armed groups whether it's eliminating foreign funding for civil society so that playbook exists and i liked um rosary's point about well in in our case what is then the pushback to the pushback and how should we be countering um what is systemic learning and and and action by these regimes um a colleague larry dimon has referred to the past decade as a past decade of democratic recession we've seen a third of all new democracies fail uh since the third wave of democratization began 30 years ago so it's a pretty um it's a pretty seemingly bleak picture when it comes to democratic development but in the midst of this democratic recession and systemic crackdowns on civil society around the world we're also seeing an upsurge in people power movements so some people have referred to the arab spring and the popular uprisings in the middle east and north africa um the social justice movements in brazil and malaysia um the pro-democracy movement in hong kong as sort of the fourth wave of democracy to use a samuel hunnington's uh term and certainly the past decade plus has been an extremely contentious uh period so we're seeing you know crackdowns in global space but an upsurge in human agency and uh people power movements uh around the world and what are we talking about with people power so we talked to my colleague talked about the professionalization of of civil society and this endemic problem of elites not wanting to give up power well what people power is about is how ordinary citizens who are organized in non-traditional groups labor unions professional groups women's collectives hip-hop artists who are organized all these groups coming together and engaging in extra institutional and sometimes extra legal nonviolent direct action in an attempt to shift power in society and in attempt to challenge um power holders and essentially to advance basic human rights and freedoms um this method of struggle involves both confrontational actions and also obviously engagements with governments and with power holders but the the the theory of change is that sometimes you need to shake up a system in order to get to meaningful resolution into peace building and that's sort of the essence of people uh people power historically we know that social movements have been major drivers of economic social and political change um we know from women's rights movements from environmental rights movements certainly uh ban banning the land mines campaign just a few examples of how organized citizen movements have transformed global politics um some of you may be familiar with the research that i've conducted with my partner Erica Chenoweth um we wanted to ask the question and answer the question how effective um really are nonviolent movements and historically how effective um have nonviolent campaigns been against the toughest of the tough opponents so dictatorships foreign military occupations um movements for territorial secession and self-determination until Eric and I undertook this quantitative study there had been no attempt to compare uh systematically violent and nonviolent campaigns to figure out which one was historically more effective so we found um that after collecting data on 323 campaigns from 1900 to 2006 we found that the nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as effective historically as armed campaigns against these formidable foes and not only that in a point that's very relevant for this conversation today we were very interested in how the resistance type affected the society that followed and the society after the transition and we found a very strong positive correlation between nonviolent resistance and both democratic development and consolidation and civil peace so there seems to be something um inherent in the process of nonviolent organizing building broad-based coalitions negotiating between strange bedfellows which happens during movements that seems to be conducive to democratic development and so this this work on movements i think is particularly relevant to this challenge of closing space because the reality is that we can no longer support civil society using the old methods in the old ways it's become very difficult in most parts of the world to support traditional NGOs and CSOs and also there's a there's a fundamental flaw in the business model you know the professionalization of civil society but also you know creating donor dependencies is not healthy for civil society and supporting groups that have no local constituency and mobilization base is simply problematic it detracts from what civil societies are supposed to do so i mean you know we know that collective action can help open new democratic spaces and so we need to think about supporting these actors that historically have been in the forefront of these types of changes so we think about the ladies in white in cuba we think about ballet sitoyen which my colleague will talk about the citizens broom in burkina faso we talk about the union for democratic front in south africa trade unions and civic groups the polish solidarity movement non-traditional civil society actors who ultimately immobilize people for fundamental change the challenge is that supporting movements is not easy it's it's actually quite difficult to do the model is different the structure of often leaderless diffused decentralized movements is certainly different from traditional NGOs and CSOs you have this whole idea of the kiss of death dilemma well if there's foreign support is this going to delegitimize and undermine the effectiveness especially if it's coming from us government and other bilateral donors you have this idea that activists don't think in terms of log frames they really don't and their M&E is going to be very different from what we're used to frankly so so in thinking about what support could be helpful and i'll end on this point i think there are two basic categories of external actor support for nonviolent movements and social movements and the first involves the tools in the approaches creating an enabling environment for nonviolent citizen action and the second is providing timely catalytic support to sort of the frontline defenders and activists so the enabling space and then the direct support. I co-authored with two colleagues Sara Flakhani and Nadia Navivala a USIP special report that's out available on the tables and basically in the report we are advocating for a movement mindset when it comes to supporting civil society which means coming up with innovative ways to support these local change advocates and we're not talking i'm glad you mentioned the money part this is not about throwing a lot of money at movements the worst thing we can do is to create a marketplace for activism which would absolutely kill meaningful nonviolent movements but what it does mean is actively showing solidarity using the tools we know i wish more foreign service officers studied the diplomats handbook for democratic development support it should be a mainstay in the foreign service institute we have a military engagement handbook now that shows how militaries can help create and support democratic development in non-democracies a military engagement handbook and i think what we talk about it is how external actors can help provide new help create fora for activists and civil society members to learn from each other so the peer-to-peer learning at the end of the day is incredibly incredibly important it's so much more effective for activists to learn from activists who from other countries who've been tortured in prison put in jail rather than western active uh intellectuals or educators coming in and talking about frankly why civil resistance works so it's very important to to provide those spaces that's why i'm quite excited frankly um rosary about what usa is doing with these civil society innovation hubs it offers a huge opportunity to connect closed and open spaces traditional and non-traditional civil societies that can fundamentally help activists learn from each other and finally i would say you know in the area of international organizations and even world bank i was actually speaking at the world bank yesterday about people power and peace building and the question was well you know should the world bank get in the business of supporting movements and providing you know probably not um probably they should not be thinking about providing direct support to activists but what they can do of course is they have different leverage points with governments and they can help in that enabling environment space and they can also through their social accountability work support civil society do social monitoring auditing of services which at the end of day is a form of people power and a form of social mobilization so i would say i would encourage folks to think about what a movement mindset means in your own work and i hope that this will translate into the discussion after thank you thank you and last but not least camissa good morning everyone all right so it's a little difficult to go after everybody but i'll try to do my best so i would like to start off by telling you about all the great things that the net does our main mission is really to strengthen democratic institutions around the world and specifically to assist civil society organizations mainly for funding but also through strategic guidance and counsel so please tell the world bank not to get into that for example and specifically in the africa program one of our main objectives has been to develop civil society capacity to work constructively with their governments wherever possible and also to resist the urge of joining these governments in either an appointed quality or an elected as an elected official capacity more generally i would like to say that the role of civil society in consolidating democracy an opposing authoritarian rule is historically undeniable and i'm sure each one of us here can cite at least dozens of countries where civil society organizations and the grassroots communities they represent have made their voices heard and and could not be silenced i am thinking the spring i'm thinking the african spring which may have started back in 2012 in senegal when youth movements have pushed president abdulaiwad out of power when he was seeking a third term and more recently the example of a blessed compagny of Burkina Faso has made the headlines this is all very positive however on the african continent and elsewhere in the world civil society has become cumbersome to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments and heads of states who wish to remain in in power basically and that is because by nature civil society is diverse and its actions and initiatives are complex and they operate on many many fronts imagine a person basically who would want to make the sun disappear by just hiding it with both hands i'm not sure that that person would be successful at that and that's basically what civil society organizations are to authoritarian governments CSO's actions and struggle have to be analyzed in the context within which they occur and i would like my very short presentation to focus on three main countries that perfectly fit in the title silencing voices and shrinking democratic spaces and these countries are the gambia which doesn't receive much media attention Ethiopia and Burundi uh to start off the gambia is i would say the last remaining full-fledged dictatorship of west africa president yaya jame who took over in the military coup in 1994 and has recently escaped a coup attend has progressively removed all liberties pertaining to the press or to NGOs working on public policy related matters very much like in Ethiopia in the gambia independent media and eight NGOs are not operating in a free manner and state control over their activities is extremely extremely heavy in Ethiopia the 2009 charities and societies proclamation the CSP prevents organizations receiving more than 10 percent of their funds from foreign sources from engaging in activities that seek to promote democracy human rights conflict resolution and protection of the rights of women minorities and and ethnic groups the charities and society agency which is the NGO regulatory body in Ethiopia established under the CSP has excessive powers to monitor NGOs interfere in their internal affairs and decide whether an organization needs to be dissolved or not going south of Ethiopia in Burundi which has been making the headlines over the past few weeks and even this morning due to the violent protests following currencies as candidacy for a third term CSOs have very high capacity and I would say they're maybe the strongest of the Great Lease region however in that country judicial harassment arbitrary detention and threats to human rights defenders have been under rise notably government officials have regularly been summoning human rights defenders activists and journalists in reaction to statements and reports on human rights so I would like to quickly mention some of the strategies used by the NED in these closed societies first of all it is important to support these organizations all groups that are in country who are seeking to work creatively within the very small spaces that they have at the NED what we've done is we've funded both what we call soft projects that work in a collaborative manner with the governments as well as supported more active or adversarial initiatives that are undertaken by informal groups or activists who may not be registered formally as an organization but are actively advocating for human rights and democratic rights in their countries second strategy that we've had and I think that it's maybe one of the most important points that I will be making here is that in closed societies most activists or some or many activists journalists are being forced into exile so it is important not to forget about the large and politically active diaspora of these countries so it is important to support initiatives by activists that are also based outside of the country and could have an impact within these countries related to this for organizations that are based in countries there are ways to support offshore projects bring activists from the country outside of the country in a safer environment to discuss among themselves to share knowledge with peers for example and it is also important to support regional and international advocacy efforts for these organizations that are based in country I would like to conclude by saying three things first of all the de facto civil liberties civil society organizations should enjoy around the world need to be solidified and expanded second point harassment of CSOs in one country or the other cannot and should not be isolated the regional repercussions of such need to be analyzed for adequate response and finally there are groups out there who are ready to take to take risks to defend their liberties and oppose authoritarian rule these groups need assistance they need guidance and most importantly they need support be it material support be it financial support or even moral support thank you thank you commiss and and thanks to our panel the discipline that this panel has exhibited given all that they had to share with us I think is is very very important we're we're down to about 20 minutes before lunch so I I think I'm going to resist the temptation to to pose some questions myself let's turn it over to you with the richness that was given us and again we'll have folks with the mic they're already hands up and a lot of hands up so let let let's begin with these three good women in a row right here and I promise you will go to a second and third round thank you so much hey one of the good women is happy to speak I'm Mindy Reiser I'm vice president of an NGO called global peace services Maria your presentation was fascinating and I would like you to speak about something that was once upon a time called routinization of charisma and that means how you take a movement with a lot of energy a lot of grassroots support a lot of charisma and then help it channel its energy and its vision into a political system how you take these ideas and structure them into a parliamentary process without adulterating and losing that commitment and energy thank you such a good clear question the second one right behind here thank you I'm Julia Roy I'm president of partners for democratic change and perhaps it's a follow-on comment and and then a question regard with this idea about the professionalization of civil society and the concern that we have after that third wave of democracy where so many of us in the room were a part of working with and strengthening NGOs in countries and what I've seen a lot of most recently is this factionalization of civil society in those countries between the divide of NGOs who have been doing this fight now democracy and human rights or peace building organizations for more than 25 years and then they see their colleagues and their donors say nope not anymore we're actually really interested in people power and we want to go to the kind of sexy activists and it's really causing a lot of conflict locally and you have people who should be working together who perhaps aren't working together only because we see this really kind of movement towards trying to find the sexy activists I mean that in quotes who are bringing about real change but then that really we need to be making those linkages and helping through our funding sources and if we're concerned about the business model then how do we also support as pieces of this funding pipeline how do we support those different business models of thinking about kind of their sustained work in newsways and with with that I would love to hear more from commissa about how she actually gets money to those movements really because that is a big challenge for us just in practical terms if there isn't an NGO with a bank account how are you supporting them thank you thank you and the last one for the surround to rose up thank you my name is moira burst and I work with an NGO called peace brigades international and our work is to protect human rights activists and other members of civil society in parts of the world where the space is is closing for them and so I want to ask about the question that tanya raised about about protection and it's not just a self-serving question because I'm actually interested in your thoughts on parts of the world where pbi's model doesn't work I mean we our model requires a space where countries care at least a little bit about their international reputation and the international levers of of aid that can be brought to bear on those countries and and so are on the ground monitoring and observation and physical presence in those countries can help inform those relationships but what about countries where where that kind of a model doesn't work where the countries where the governments don't really care about their international reputations and are willing therefore to ignore you know the kinds of international advocacy that that we all in this room might do thanks thank you three good pointed questions to individuals and and well stated in each case Maria start us off so that was a great question about the routinization of chrisma I hadn't heard that phraseology before very interesting and essentially your question is sort of helping movements pivot from protest to politics is that yeah so I mean first of all I think the sort of the single charismatic leader as the head of a movement is more the exception vice the norm I mean we know the Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Alhansansu Ki and like but most the vast majority of other successful nonviolent movements tend to be less focused on a single individual and I think there's something to be said about when you're doing training and capacity building and skills building sort of supporting decentralized leadership and the replication of leadership within a movement I think that bodes well for what comes after as well so sort of moving away from the charismatic leader model which is problematic frankly in so many respects and sort of focus on developing decentralized leadership I would also say so there's a lot of debate well when should we help youth movements form political parties or when should we be pushing them towards parties parties are critical I mean parties are a glue a huge part of the glue between sort of popular movements and democratic consolidation but obviously there's no template for in this you know movement should always become parties no they probably shouldn't be I think actually what's happening in Ukraine right now um is a fascinating case of you know many members of the Maidan movement many hardcore activists have entered government and at least one I know who was always on the outside protesting the government in corruption she's now overseeing like donor funds coming into the government and monitoring so you have this yet whereas a lot of activists have stayed on the outside so I think you know but encouraging them to think through alternative pathways to political participation what it means to engage in a constitutional reform process parliamentary processes political that should be part of the thinking as they're doing movement organization protest demonstrations that has to be sort of forefront um did you want to take the fractionalization of NGOs taking take no I mean so the point on so I don't have a necessarily averse reaction sexy activists I just most of the activists I know and I'm sure you know are like some of the most courageous and imperiled and threatened people and so I think finding ways to support them and show solidarity is actually critically important and should not be sort of seen as sort of a side effort in the like I agree with you that this divide between traditional and non-traditional civil society is problematic even in the report that we've written we're not saying NGOs and CSOs should not be supported that they should not exist absolutely not CSOs NGOs especially in closed environments can sometimes provide convening space and they can help build capacity and inculcate skills for non-traditional civil society actors that's happened in Egypt and some other places and so I but I don't think that the effort has shifted to supporting non-traditional civil society actually I think it's still pretty much focused on a lot is focused on CSOs NGOs so again the regional civil society hubs could play a very interesting role in bringing together traditional and non-traditional as well as closed and open spaces do you want to comment on that Tonya too I think I want to add in that way bringing some of the questions together and take it from a strategic angle what I see is as you rightly said is the transition from movements that happens often place is you see them either going into becoming NGOs or they become political parties and both is not wrong in a way but what is missing in key moments of transitions is definitely the strategic vision for that and the support is often like okay what do you need and it's very often focused that the partner is taken as the the holy kind of thing the partner needs yeah instead of saying like well yes we want to take your needs serious we want to understand the context but there is a lot of comparative expertise out there and we would like you to get to know about that and here I'm a big fan of a scenario planning and I would like to link that also to the protection question I give you an example if you have in a fragile environment for example you do media training you do journalist training you work with editors to change all this the usual things we do and then if you then don't work with scenarios to understand like okay what are the different options in the country what could happen and is my journalist training still relevant in this or that scenario then the problem is that we don't move into protection with that same project if we have not planned for it and if from the beginning of the start we have said under these conditions we cannot it makes no sense whatsoever to continue journalist training in Sri Lanka they have continued to do journalist training while journalists were killed by weekly and it took like another year until a fund for journalists to fly them out of the country basically and give them assignments abroad was set up and I think this should not happen this should be planned in and that's the same for this transition between movements and NGOs when we have different scenarios we need to show the activists what are the options and the last point I wanted to make is about what you made earlier the peer-to-peer the peer-to-peer exchange is important but I would also put a caveat to it it depends extremely how it's done in that sense I mentioned that yesterday in a number of workshops we had I call it death by context what happens very often is when you put activists together in let's say the wrong format they will all tell you about the context for ages because they think you need to understand it and they will not pull out the lessons learned that are relevant for the others so we need to prepare well for this kind of peer-to-peer we can just throw them together and say exchange and I think this is what I have seen and it has not been effective and we have to learn from that thank you can this are the questions that were addressed about the money how do you how do you get the money to them well we've been very creative about that so these organizations there are sometimes informal or made up of individuals so there are different ways you could wire money to their individual accounts you can wire money to other organizations who have the right to receive money from friend funding or you could do it next door like in another country so we don't smuggle money per se I don't want to say that but there are many ways and we can talk about it later on the record there you go let's do another three or four here you've got them right there in front of you yes thank you very much Adam Kaplan USAID's office of transition initiatives I'd like to pose something that was mentioned early but then didn't get addressed in later comments the closing of space by non-state actors yes we have to deal with belligerent state actors but the non-state actors seem especially immune to any pressures comments there please thank you right and back Aaron Chastain Catholic release services I really appreciated Maria's reference to the devil's playbook and my question is about probably a key chapter in that which would be the financial action task force which has been ghostwritten just across the town at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and its neighbor at Treasury has anyone actually documented and researched the costs of such measures at the individual organizational and institutional levels to civil society leaders activists and to their organizations and obviously at the institutional level looking at exactly what you're talking about the space for civil society could I ask you which particular measures because there's a w