And David is playing the good cop, and I will play the bad cop, and urge everyone to return to their seats so that we can get on with round two of our exciting adventure today. Spurred on by what I thought was a terrific close to the first session. And I see that there are some reinforcements in the room. John Temmon has joined us. Good. Is everybody here? Almost. Almost. Good. Turned it back over to David. Okay. So we're going to now turn our discussion in a more political direction. We're going to look at a political scenario, but first we'd like to talk a little bit about some of the political factors at play and try to stretch our thinking a little bit about what kind of tools may be available to us. Before we do that, let's answer how many questions, Claire, three, four, three. So let's just do three quick questions, get everybody's brains working again after multiple sandwiches. What is the largest political driver of extremism? Here to create representative governments, persistent ethnic tensions, concentration of political power in the hands of the few, corruption, or other? All of the above, of course, are there, but the question is what is the largest? Forty-two percent say concentration of political power in the hands of few, and six percent say other. Who said other here? Why did you say other? Well, it may not be the most important, but I think we're going to neglect religion to our disadvantage here today. I mean, religion is such a central factor in this. I can talk more about it later, but I think the religious factors have to be considered. Okay. Very important. Yes. I was going to say along those lines, a utopian ideological worldview. What do you mean in terms of these guys, in terms of the bokeh or robin? Yes. You just got to speak closer to the microphone. The fragmentation of the ULAMA, the competition between sex, the funding of different sex by foreign universities like the International Islamic University of Medina has created enormous competition among different religious leaders that eventually spawned Muhammad Yusuf. Okay. Interesting. There's a comment here from the audience. Poverty and economic exclusion. Okay. Thank you very much. One more. From where? Here. To your right, sir. To your other right. The United States. Oh, the United States. Yeah. I'm sorry. There's people all over, and I've ... Okay. I would put just an incompetent government of which corruption is just one part of the incompetent government. Oh, okay. Excellent point. Excellent point. Next question. What international bodies can play the largest role in helping to establish effective governance that combats extremism? International NGOs, the UN, donor governments, international financial institutions, or other? I mean, clearly some work must be done domestically, but what international organizations Okay. So international NGOs lead the way with a tie between donor governments and international financial institutions. Who said other? Why did you say other? None of them, in my experience, are going to do anything to really help a government in the short term deal with an extremist threat. Is there some international mechanism that can? The coalitions led by the United States, however risky that might be, have done some good. Okay. Good. I would use the word coalition lightly, but of civil society organizations that are brought together. Laying a lot of places. Sorry. Civil society organizations that are brought together by international bodies to communicate amongst each other. Okay. Brents? I didn't like the concept donor governments because Nigeria doesn't need a lot of money. Governments that are influential for politically and other reasons may have more influence, but I don't like the idea that we don't. Okay. That's an important distinction. Sarah, did you want to say something? I was going to say the same thing, and I was going to say you're not going to like it, but I don't think any of this matters so much in that more than most other countries where we work, that Nigeria is insular. Okay. I have no objection to that. I was going to say OIC. OIC is more important. Okay. Michael? I was going to say as a corollary to Ambassador Jeffrey that I come down the side of donor governments, but I would expand it in the way that Ambassador Lyman said, and my view is that there are things that they can do to hinder the establishment of effective governance, and sometimes it's about what you don't do as opposed to what you do. Okay. Next question. What is the most effective tool the international community has to push for political reform? Governance training, policy-based loans, democracy promotion, support for local NGOs, pressure from the international business community, other, kind of thinking it would be about 100% other here. No, it's not. So 41% of you say support for local NGOs focused on government accountability leads the way. Next, pressure from the international business community, and other, is that you too? No? Somebody else? Other? 10% of you said other and no one's owning up to it. Okay. Did you want to say something? There's a microphone. There has to be a microphone near you to say something, right over here. This gentleman. You just walked past him. No. Behind you. There you go. Briefly. Microphone's not on. Hello? Okay. Very briefly, please. I think one good way is examples that other nations can give. Like I would say, if the United States today joined the BRICS nations in promoting economic development in Africa or in Asia, that can set an example of how to transform relations among governments for other places. Okay. So these are some ideas, some views on the political. Before we get into the views on the political, I'd like to just turn to two people quickly who have, you know, in listening to the morning, had some ideas on how we can tackle these things that I think will be helpful, and the first is Maksud. Thank you. Basically I had some systematic reflections that I thought I wanted to share with all of you regarding the ethos of peace game and the dynamics of the interaction today in the morning. Basically the way I perceive the dynamic that should be in the way that I think should many ways guide the interaction in the next segment of the afternoon is basically to look at abilities of generating immediate yet short-term solutions that need to be both creative but also unorthodox. The comfortable situation where we go with long-term solutions or maybe generating some abstraction of some sort is an easy exercise. We were all acquainted with mainstream political theory and thinking where it's all about political realism and being too cynical maybe. But what we maybe need to encourage is having more of a paradigm shift, looking at the challenge which is we have a situation of the moment on the ground. We need to come up with solutions. These solutions need to be short-term, immediate, and the catch is that we have no time to maybe think in long-term ways. This is maybe not very productive and maybe not ideal, but nonetheless that's the main challenge of the peace game is how to strategize and work towards this direction. The other thing is I want to encourage all of you to think as peace strategists. Basically having some sort of a peace toolkit. Different diplomatic ways, economic means, alternative approaches than actually just referring to military approaches or ways of doing this. So that paradigm shift is important for us to be able to look at the different ideas or solutions needed in this regard. Thank you. Thanks. I just want to underscore, again, our focus here is to get outside of the box of simply straight-lining extrapolation of what's happened in the past. That requires us to be a little bit creative and for you to be not to be slave to the role you're playing, but to actually take command of the role you're playing and say within these parameters what's possible as opposed to what has been done. Michael, you had a couple of thoughts. Thank you, David. Princeton and Johnny and others here have taken part in these, but we're sitting around this table and discussing things as track one participants and so the responses we have are in that vein and going along the lines Maksud just mentioned, I think if we think ourselves perhaps closer to a 1.5 or a track two where there are the opportunities for confidence-building measures identified early unorthodox recommendations so there's a creativity that comes out of it, I think that might help the conversation. Good. I think both of them is the term unorthodox and I, you know, I just want to underscore that. Now what we want to do here is for the next little bit set the stage for political discussion. Talk a little bit about what the political drivers of radicalization and extremism are. You can talk about it in the context of Nigeria, you can talk about it in a broader context, but what we want to do also is talk about them in a way where even as we're commenting on what are the drivers today, we turn our attention as quickly as possible to how can we address these drivers, produce positive change, where can we find ideas in all of this. So as I asked, you know, the initial group of people that we had asked to kick this thing off, you know, the first question are what do you see the drivers, but I want to quickly go beyond that. John, let me let me start with you and what do you see as the primary political drivers in Nigeria of the kind of extremism we're talking about? I think the political timing of this phenomenon, which is started earlier but then 09 and then the jailbreak and 10 and so forth, maps almost tracks almost completely with the electoral cycle. And if you have an election that tips expectations in one way or another, if it's not seen as free and fair, you're going to have winners and losers, particularly for the presidency. And since that's where the money comes in, that's where the power is, that's where the military, the police, everything there. That's that's a do or die scenario. So the kind of the prime impetus to feeling disaffected, I think, is this question of marginalization that can come from elections, which you're not seeing is as free or fair. More recently, when the military and the security people have gotten involved in trying to put this Boko Haram down, they don't, the mass elite gap, they don't know what's going on the way the military is structured. They don't know what's going on in the grassroots. So civilians have to take over that function, but the military have been, and then even the intel people, have been flying blind in the north and sort of stomping here and there. And that has created, that has created the tsunami that we now see that was not there four years ago, was not there 10 years ago at all. So this question of kind of shining the light on the way in which the government has responded or not is important. And I won't belabor the change of government that's coming up here very shortly, but it is fair to say that the leader of the opposition was a folk hero, is a folk hero in the far north. And to feel you've been robbed in some way and that the courts are stacked is why we're really on the edge of something very serious. This is a short, short term. We'll know by the end of next week who the candidates are. And then we're in the race to see whether the election actually happens or not. But I think that the heavy handedness, you know, nine when they rounded up these kids and then shot Mohamed Youssef and then put him in jail, killed 800 people, put him in jail, and then the jail break. And then we've seen that thing, snowball ever since. So this may take longer, but I heard the Europeans offered to do some training on police. I think that would be very welcome. The EU takes this very seriously. And I know there are some real world initiatives that are coming up in that direction. But in terms of the short term, I think the marginalization coming from elections at the national level and then this heavy handedness of military and security people. And I could also say there has been no effective counter narrative. I'd like to come back to that point at some point. OK, good. And I think we should come to the point of the counter narrative. Because again, that's the kind of area where there is a lot of opportunity for creativity, particularly in societies that have a lot of internet use, for example, where there's a lot of people plugged into new media, reachable by a new means, and new narratives can take root via those new means. Martha? Well, by the way, I'd like everybody to make a special effort in the next hour to lean closer to your microphones, because everybody has just consumed food. And they're all inclined to drift off to sleep. So unless you're really close to your microphone, you're going to lose them. Yeah, good. Great. OK, I hope I'm close enough.  And I'm an academic. And sort of from an academic point of view, we would say that the Boko Harami. So now you've lost all credibility. Now I've lost all credibility. I'll have to restore it somehow. That the Boko Harami insurgency or terrorism or outbreak or whatever we want to call it is, it's in effect over determined to use academic jargon in that there are so many causes. There's not one. There's not two. There's so many. And everything we've talked about feeds into it, which means that it's, to say it's enormously complicated also leads one to lose credibility. But what it means is that in order to address it, you've got to come at it from different vectors at the same time. And those vectors have to be coordinated. And we talk about thinking holistically, but do we have any real ideas about how we could do this? The sorts of things we could do together. And so I agree completely with John and I think the notion of looking, not just at overall, all these conditions that might lead to it, but the timing of the outbreak is critical to understanding what's going on. I also think that sort of the history of Boko Harami shows us a couple of things that are very important. One is that this is not a unitary entity here. We've been treating it this morning as though it were a something. And there is a something, but this is a very divided group. What we have now is splinters and splinters. I think those of you who are more familiar with the history will know that. And you have the founding father in effect who's killed by the security forces. All this is important to their mythology. Also, I think it's important to remember that it's very much locally rooted. It arose in circumstances that are extremely propitious for the rise of this particular ideology. And many of you know these circumstances much better than I. I think that the government repression is also an extremely important issue. And across my mind that one of the reasons that I was invited might be a chapter that I've written for a recent USIP publication in which I concluded with sort of the bad example of Nigeria in which the security forces are strong enough to engender grievances by their brutality and their human rights abuses not strong enough to completely crush the movement in the North. And so you're caught in this terrible dilemma of if they were weaker, the problem might not have been exacerbated so much. If they were stronger, the end might have been quicker but more brutal. But now you're stuck in this in between and how do you change that sort of dynamic? So on that optimistic note, I'll start. Well, let me go back. I wanna probe a little bit further. Something that's gonna come up again in the course of our discussion. You said we can do this. We have to approach this on multiple levels. Who's we? I think the responsibility has to be primarily at the level of the Nigerian government, the government in Abuja as well as the governments in the North. And I have to admit that this morning we were talking about what can the international community do? I don't see that there are a whole lot of things that we can do and we shouldn't think that we can leap into this and certainly in the short term. And I agree completely with John that until we know what's gonna happen with regard to the elections, I think we need to be prepared for what are the likely outcomes of the electoral process if they happen, if they're accompanied by violence who wins. And that will really be very important in determining what the international community and its different elements could do. And I'll just add to that. I was sort of, I wasn't surprised because it's very realistic, but when the minute there's violence against the UN or against international NGOs, they pull out. We've seen this happen again and again. I understand the reasons why they do that, but the results are very unfortunate. Yeah, I think this question of who is we, who is the coalition, how do you do this? Which by the way can vary on issue by issue within this sort of array of ways that one has to address this political issue is vitally important. And I think a related question is, or there are two related questions to come to mind. What if the government that you feel has got primary responsibility isn't actually capable of doing that? The traditional response of the rest of the world is to shrug and to say, well then, there's not much that can be done. And I think one of the points of looking at extremism rather than any individual group is that this is a global trend. And there has to be a tipping point when people stop saying these are all isolated incidents that don't connect to one another because when you do look at them as isolated incidents, you don't feel an obligation to get involved. But if you see them as a pattern that extends from the West Coast of Africa straight into Asia, then it has a strategic consequence and it might create a motivation for governments or institutions to get involved with it. And this is really, this drives a lot of the discussion and I just wanna flag it here. So as we go forward, we've got it in mind. Muhammad, you are the next in line. Thank you very much. I think while we continue to overemphasize the failure of governance at the center for obvious reasons, we should not close our eyes to complete failure of the other tiers of government, particularly the states in the North as well as the local government and the cultural and traditional institutions. Before independence, the cultural and traditional institutions played a very key role in all aspects of governance. And when the British colonized Northern Nigeria, they did find that the level and quality of governance was almost comparable to what they had in other parts of the British Empire. Hence the indirect rule of policy that they adopted in governing the Northern protectorate. Then, but over the years from independence to now and we have seen the erosion of authority, the almost total collapse of the Emirates system as we move from parliamentary system of government before the war, civil war and during the civil war, the creation of the states by general government in order to address some of the issues of marginalization and development that we talked about earlier in the morning and part of this afternoon. With the adoption of the presidential system of government, the US model in 1979, it was our hope that all these issues of marginalization that led to the civil war would have been addressed once and for all. People would have been given platforms to be inclusive both politically and economically. And in addition to the 36 tech structure, we have 774 local governments that were supposed to serve as platforms for local civil society to participate at the all levels. But what we have seen is in the North in particular, is the near collapse of our demonstration both at the local government levels and in some of the states, in most of the states, I would say, with the exception of a few that you talked about, Kano, for example, stands out very clearly due largely to the leadership, to the current leadership in Kano that decided to make a difference. So something has to be done. There's a debate going on and we saw in the National Comfab that took place a couple of months ago whether we should set aside the American system and go back to the parliamentary system or whether we should adopt the French mixed bug, but be that as it may, the issue it's about leadership. It's about the quality of leadership, not only in Abuja, but also in the states as well as the local government and also the traditional institutions. The emergence of Sanusi in Kano as Amia has excited some enthusiasm, especially among the youths that will probably see a more dynamic, more modern and effective leadership at the traditional level. They do not have roles, official roles in the constitution, in the American constitution that we adopted. They have been called for them to be given specific roles to give them authority in order to address some of these local issues. So I think we have to look at it from a holistic point of view. I'm sure Professor Payden and Martha will agree that we have failed. It is what we are seeing, the dysfunctional system that is now producing insurgences like Boko Haram is a direct result of this failure at our level. And we welcome this type of to-do-in-round tables with experts who have other experiences in other parts of the world who would provide some input into how we'll be able to correct ourselves. Thank you. That's a very important point and it's really something I want to get into immediately in the context of this conversation. I'm going to turn to Chris next and then we're going to open it up a little bit. But what is an advantage in the context of this kind of discussion is looking at other places that have faced similar situations and have produced things that may have worked or may have at least had some lessons. And a number of you around the room have had experience in those places and I want to turn to you next. But Chris, I would like to direct the same question to you in terms of what do you perceive as the most important economic drivers? I mean, political drivers. Thank you for what you said. I think it's very fascinating to be having these conversations on the eve of what could be probably the most competitive political election that Nigeria has had in recent history. And so with that in mind, I want to make sure that as we talk about the political drivers, we make a distinction between the origins or the direct causes of extremism and all of these political grievances which may exacerbate or aggravate the situation without necessarily being the primary causes. And I think that point was raised very early on this morning in saying, yes, people can feel marginalized, they can be low levels of economic development, they can be a sense of lack of representation. But these issues, even in aggregate form, cumulatively do not necessarily trigger extremism. There has to be a trigger moment. And then these issues can become enabling factors that provide the swarms in which extremism can thrive. With that said, I will just make two comments to get us started. One is that I think one of the political drivers for me is the very centralized nature of the Nigerian state. Which, contrary to its constitutional provisions of being a federation, tends to centralize a lot of the power in Abuja. And so what this happened, what this means, and probably it's a legacy of the military rule which is very centralized, and in the situation where we see Nigeria constantly struggling to re-establish its federalism, what this means is that grievances at the local level tend to be directed towards the centrality of power in Abuja. And so when people have grievances of lack of service delivery at the local level, they don't tend to look at the local government area, chairman, or the state governors, they direct their grievances towards Abuja. And I think that's something that Nigeria is still struggling with. The second political driver for me is how citizens in a democratizing society interpret political outcomes of competitive processes in which they're losers. And for me, this issue really came to the fore in 2010 and 2011, first with the debate over the succession of the then vice president with the passing of the president. Which debate was even coming just three years after there had been the whole question about the term elongation with Obasanjo, noting that the fight to respect how the constitutional respected was led by then vice president Attiku, who was also from the north. And then three years after that, Yeradua from the north passes and Jonathan becomes the vice president. And I think the manner in which that whole debate was driven within the domestic body politic of Nigeria exacerbated some of the hard feelings within certain constituencies in the north. And so you fast forward to 2011, and we have what I still believe was a very credible election in 2011, a much better election than any of the other presidential elections Nigeria had experienced since 1999. And after the election results were announced, that a certain segment of society felt aggrieved by the outcome of those elections. And we saw what happened with the riots on over 800 people that mostly in northern cities. So I think that the way in which citizens interpret democratization processes has a lot to say in how they perceive whether they're part of the process and part of the game and therefore likely to benefit from some of this dividends of democratic governance or not. That's why for me, when you put up one of the very early questions, I thought one of the ingredients to even the whole question of the political drivers is the level of citizen awareness and the level of education about what democratic governance is about and how the processes naturally should work in favor of the entirety of the country as opposed to a few individuals. Okay, so we can approach this on several levels. We can identify political drivers that contribute to extremism. And again, this is similar to the development discussion. While building healthy, stable, high functioning governments is an overall objective, our focus is more specifically on the conditions that promote extremism. They're not completely separable, but it's more on that. So what are the things that drive that dysfunctional government, corruption in the government, lack of representation, disenfranchisement, splits between the federal government, the local government over concentration of power in the center. There are a number of things that have been mentioned here. So those are drivers of the kind of conditions that might promote extremism. And then we can talk about what do we do about those things? And when we say we, of course there are many different definitions, is there some, are there some things that have to be done internally by the Nigerian government in which case, do external actors who have an interest in seeing them do that find a way to influence the Nigerian government. So that becomes the challenge. How do you influence the Nigerian government? In some cases, the Nigerian government may not be capable of doing it. In which case you say, are there other means other than the Nigerian government for affecting that? One of them might be changing a narrative using social media, another might be using NGOs and training programs and so on and so forth. But what are the other tools that might do that? And among the questions associated with that are who are the right parties to advance those things? Because clearly, if you have a movement that is skeptical of the West and Western education, it may not be desirable to have a bunch of organizations that look, sound and act Western be at the forefront of that. If there's a debate about the true nature of Islam, in the midst of it, perhaps it lends itself to having countries that have more experience with that be at the front of it. And so we have a multi-tiered problem here. What are the drivers? What are the tools? Who are the actors best in power to use those tools? And then what perhaps is a strategy for addressing those things? Do any of you who have experiences outside of Nigeria that you feel are relevant in the context of Nigeria? Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, it's a belabored times, the ISIS comparison, but I think there is a little bit of kernel of truth. You have a problem and you have a solution. The problem, all these drivers of governance and corruption and all of that, there is a ready-made plausible solution. That's why I mentioned the utopian ideological world view is the problem is this Nigerian reality. There's a reality on the ground, people suffering, people being marginalized. And you have hollowed out institutions. And then you have, there is a model. There is a model for resistance, for seeking some sort of justice. There's this very horrible, terrible, violent, Takfiri Salafi Jihadi model, which lends itself to these types of situations. So, it kind of goes back to a guy who was neither a Nigerian nor an Islamist who wrote a paper called, wrote a book called What Is To Be Done, right? As Lenin wrote, what is to be done about this problem? Well, there is a solution in the eyes of these extremists to this thing. And it's not development, and it's not all these other things. It's a type of political violence or a just cause. And this ties into the whole question of counter-narratives. By the way, on that I would mention, there's I think some really real world important work being done by a cleric based in the United Arab Emirates in the shake of Dala bin Baya with the Nigerian clerics, which is important to kind of build a counter-narrative. But I would focus on that kind of, the solution to the problem is a violent form of political Islam. I'd like to address the issue of tools in the who that you brought up. And I think that those of us who work in this rather new field of CVE or counter-violent extremism, accept two basic principles about the practice. And one is that there is no cookie cutter policy strategy or tactic that works in every context and it's completely different wherever you are and whatever the dynamics and drivers are. The second one is that the only viable CVE solution has to be locally owned and has to be delivered by local incredible voices. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a role for outsiders and Westerners or NGOs or international players. And I think what's important to acknowledge is that there's an actual defined body of knowledge and skills tied to developing counter-narratives, skills that can be taught and transferred and then taken on the unique and contextual issues in any particular country. So I think of CVE as something that can be taught and transferred. And I think that's an important way to think about this kind of work. Pauline. Yes, I'd just like to introduce a note of caution here. As what we're really talking about here is a war on perceptions and shaping perceptions, whether we do it through economic or political tools. And there is a danger here that if we develop a strategy or a set of tools or initiatives that are defined only in terms of counter-terrorism, it's a weak read on which to hang our policy in Nigeria because they will suspect that we'll go home real soon. There are people that wanna fight terrorism but they are basically suffering under the penalty of both a terrorist organization and a predatory government. It's a twin threat to the people who's living in Nigeria. And unless we balance that in a way or shape the tools or policies that we do with a narrative that offers hope for the future for Nigeria as a unitary entity and we haven't talked about whether this actually will bring Nigeria up to the brink again and threaten the unity of the country. And that's a real important thing because a lot of people will conclude that the way out here is the way out. That in fact they dissolve the country and every section of the country goes their own way. So I just think that defining it, I know we're doing it for US interests in terms of counter-terrorism it's related to everything else that you laid out David. But there is a danger here that if we confine ourselves simply to a strategy of counter-terrorism without talking about the other threats that are there it could backfire. Right and look, we don't wanna confine ourselves to something and thus make what we do ineffective. We wanna stick to things that are effective Bronwyn. I've done a great deal of work in Somalia and in my opinion one of the massive mistakes that was made in that conflict was the lumping in of a legitimate movement with the terrorist label. When we use words like extremism and terror. Yeah, lately. Sure, sorry. When we use words like extremism and terror to describe a group we're attempting to delegitimize them. You know Chris is used to the Congress and everybody's shouting at each other all the time. That's right. Yeah. And I think here in the case of Boko Haram it is undeniably true A that the Nigerian government has been a driver of the conflict and B that though there are indeed a lot of large problems that are pushing people into extremism there are also small and specific drivers that can be addressed. For example, Boko Haram has said that it's kidnapped women and girls because the Nigerian government has arrested its own women, wives and children and there's no reason that the international community cannot push the Nigerian government to examine those claims and release any innocent women and children that it's holding. I'd also like to point out that when we have these easy remedies available to us and we don't choose to act on them we reinforce the idea that violence is an okay option because we are also not being reasonable. Okay, important point, Leanne. One of the things that I think might be useful for us to- This is you speaking as you. Sorry. Not in your capacity as Boko Haram. Not in my capacity as Boko Haram. Is to think about that Boko Haram is actually somewhat of a fragmented organization and so is the concept of government in Nigeria or in a lot of places and if we think about them as solely of one to 15 personalities in Abuja that we're most familiar with we're missing the fact that there's an entirety of a civil service that underpins a Nigerian state of 175 million people. And so the concept of civil service might be something in this governance challenge that we come back to over and over again that actually the international community can have a little bit more influence on rather than just the personality based influence of a couple at the top in Nigeria. And even though the security services for the most part are centralized and national there a lot of the other types of government players are actually local. And so I know USIP with bringing the governors here was part of this but I think we can get even more local than that because what are the drivers of extremism is one question but some of these things are actually just veneers and if you just peel back the onion one layer earlier you're not it's not actually those drivers that are these big political drivers they're actually pretty localized. Well that's a good point we have a couple of folks here from Nigeria up in the stands here and I just I'd love to get as many Nigerian voices as we could particularly as we've been talking about this did you guys want to talk a little bit about how you're how what the perspective is from the local level as to what the drivers are and particularly on the political side of it. Yeah thank you very much. My name is Florence from Nigeria and civil society and from our perspective the political drivers also the selection process of our leaders is a real issue. And we see election as being fixed. We don't look at election being real in Nigeria being fixed that a leader must be there and believe it or not if this incoming election Jonathan is not there again Boko Haram will go there which also die in natural deaths that's the way we say it and if it happens that power shifted to the nut again then another insurgents will happen at the southern level so how do we place the divide? The solution will come from us we know we are the shoes is paying and we can do it. Thank you. No, did you want to say something as well? Later? Later, okay, okay. All right, let's go down to click. Let me just from a journalistic point of view I think one of the things I would want to do is ask Matt to write a long weekend takeout and among the things that I asked him to explore this gets back a little bit to what you were saying David are the, is the ideology of Boko Haram how it is the same or different from the ideology of say Al-Shavab in Somalia or Ansar Al-Islam and other extremist groups in the Maghreb and Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Peninsula Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb as well, as well. I'd ask him to look also at the spread of radicalization as a driver and the extent to which the Saudis particularly and the Iranians since 1979 may have spread that 1979 was the Iranian revolution it was a galvanizing moment for not just for Shia but also for Sunnis you had the first modern nation dedicated openly to Jihad and that 1979 was also the year you had the siege of Mecca which we had ultra-Wahhabis taking over the most important capital of Islam and that had a real impact on Saudi Arabia and it wasn't a moderating impact the Saudis had to get to the right of that in a certain extent and then I would also ask him to make sure he covers the extent to which what I would call the jihadist brand of extremism is anti-Westphalia in other words it is an attack on the whole concept of the nation state and so it makes a lot of sense for Salafi jihadists to look at weak nation states, corrupt nation states nation states where people don't have a strong sense of national identity particularly if there are a lot of Muslims that you can recruit and to go into those states and try to destroy them is a way to destroy the Westphalian system and more generally and Western dominance as well and maybe Matt wants to pick up a how he would approach reporting that. By the way we're not playing a scenario here you could just be mad if you want. What's that? I'm always mad sir. Very good. No but it strikes me too that we're avoiding one of the most obvious things that Buk-a-Huram is part of a global network that's risen up in the last few years of a set of affiliates of Al-Qaeda there is some evidence out there that they've trained with Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb so taking into mind all the pathologies of Nigeria I can acknowledge them but they apply to possibly the majority of countries poverty, corruption, bad governance and there must be there probably is something else going on here and I think we might want to raise that issue as well. Yes, John. Let me insert just a couple of important historical facts and also reiterate I think some of the importance of a few drivers that have been touched on. We all look back at the origins of Buk-a-Huram to 2002 and the turning point being 2009 when Muhammad Yusef was killed. Many have portrayed this current conflict as one of Muslim antagonism towards a Christian dominated, southern dominated government in Abuja but many people fail to remember that when the initial assaults were taken against the rise of Buk-a-Huram the president was Muhammad Yara Adua, another Muslim leader and that at the outset of the most intense and vicious parts of the upswing we did not have a Christian, southern president in power. It was the end of the Yara Adua period so this should be kept in mind which brings me to a point I think our colleague from George Mason, both of our colleagues from George Mason pointed out but I would put in a greater high relief that some of the political drivers to this conflict are indeed a failure of local government, both traditional local government and the form of Islamic leadership in the North as well as modern government and the form of governors who have equally failed to deliver the goods to their societies, have failed to deliver good and good. Education, good healthcare, good infrastructure and roads and so you have that as a failure, a failure of both traditional government and a failure of modern government at play. The other key driver which I think is of course not mentioned here is intensely is the enormous conflict between the center and the states and the competition over control, power and spoils which also exacerbates this issue to a great extent. So I think that while clearly there are a number of reasons out here, we need to look very closely. I'd also say to our colleagues on the media side that if you look back in 202 to up to 209 to 10 this is not a part of a global jihadist movement in its origins. This is a local resentment towards both traditional leaders in the church and the government as much as anything else. I think that it is evolving and has progressively evolved and some of these linkages in terms of copycatism are starting to form, but we have to remember that a lot of these drivers and go back to the economic issues as well is that you don't have to finance externally Bokeha hard. Haram, when Bokeha Haram or parts of Bokeha Haram are nothing but a criminal syndicate. Robbing banks and post offices and carrying on high class kidnappings. There is enough money in that that precludes the need for outside resourcing. And so I think that we have to be careful about equating too many of the international linkages too soon. I think that they are emerging and they're certainly emerging in the form of copycatism, but we need to remember that when all of this started to get nasty there wasn't Southern leadership in power in Abuja, it was Muslim leadership and the resentment is strong there as well. I think that's an important point. I do think however that one of the things that we've seen is groups that have arisen for different reasons morphing together or choosing to align themselves with broader movements because that empowers them in a variety of ways. And I can't help but think that listening to Johnny's description just now, Jim, that it could have been a description of Iraq. And you were ambassador of Iraq and I was wondering if you heard the same thing. Very much. It started as a local reaction to First Saddam and what he did in a almost inevitable resistance to any outside force coming in. And then of course, as you know, this variant of al-Qaeda that we associate with Zakkawi and is now morphed into ISIS with its very particular unique Shia Sunni dichotomy at its heart rose up first against us. That was its narrative but after the Fallujah battle in 2004 it directed itself far more against the Shia majority in the country in a struggle to try to provoke a regional conflict and it didn't succeed then. It's now back again coming over the border from Syria trying to do it again. I'm trying to find a conclusion from that that would apply to Boko Haram because Boko Haram hasn't developed either a unique philosophy as far as I can see that would provide its claim to jihadi supremacy in the region nor anything like the capabilities of ISIS but the problem that we had in dealing with this beyond all of the capability problems and the economic problems and the political problems and the ethnic problems you've had in Iraq was that it was an extremist ideology and a certain percent of the population would be attracted to it and would fight like hell to the death to try to expand it and you have a similar phenomenon with these people and it's very, very hard to stop without a whole lot of brutality and a whole lot of resources. It also echoes very closely some things in Afghanistan it echoes very closely some things in Libya and you do have these commonalities across the board. Yes, Sarah. So I wanna specifically raise something that we've kind of been dancing around. We've just got a couple of minutes so I'm gonna go to each of you briefly, okay? Sure and that's the question of Nigeria's response the Nigerian government's response to Boko Haram and specifically the human rights abuses that have occurred because after ideology and changing the narrative and then combating the political and economic marginalization I think this is the third top issue to countering violent extremism and not only because it's counterproductive because we're actually further alienating populations by killing hundreds of civilians and disregarding due process extradition killings you name it but there's also no accountability so we need to change the tactics and create a much more productive strategy with the Nigerian government and secondly, there has to be some kind of accountability or you're never gonna get trust from those populations. No, yes over here. I just wanna counter this idea that we're dealing with people who have very romantic ideas about the past. I think Islamism today is what communism was for a lot of people who are anti-colonial 50 or 60 years ago. You have a status quo that doesn't work and these people come and realize that with this idea I can recruit a lot of people who are very frustrated with the status quo and so these people are not really interested in ideology so much. It's a conduit. The argument is really about power and you look at people in North Nigeria or you look at people in a lot of places in the Arab world or in the Muslim world where we have failures. What the people who are coming here and trying to replace a status quo know is that there is lack of consistency on the status quo in its commitment. How committed is the central government of Nigeria to Northern Nigerian development and growth? Not so much. Can Boko Haram prove that it's gonna be more committed to that this region? It needs to do that but it knows that time is on its side. It knows that if it does this enough people will be like, okay, a couple of stonings a year, a couple of chops a year but at least things are gonna work and we're gonna get investment and things are gonna be consistent. This is the thing. What you're really fighting against is this very deep perception that local government, the state governments, the status quo is not really committed to this region.  As long as people in those regions believe that, believe that the central government is not going to be in Northern Nigeria for the long run. You're still gonna continue to see a lot of success of Boko Haram in that region and I think that's important. There's a very, very powerful point that needs to inform the way that we approach this scenario because if you accept the idea that what is motivating Boko Haram is deep-seated ideology, historical issues, religious issues that are in people's DNA, then you'll treat it one way. If you view it as a political tool, much as communism, which was a good example, which is not to say that people don't believe in elements of it, it's simply to say that they are using it for personal gains in terms of power, then your strategy isn't counter-ideological or counter-religious, it's just counter-political. It's a very different thing.  Very, very short. So I just wanna add one thing to the second half of what you just said is that we're going to cast this in terms of power and political tools. We need to add the term identity to that as well because that might be what the leaders of Boko Haram are seeking, but what's the people who are joining the group are those who are seeking an identity and that's an important piece of it. Okay, look, this has been a very useful discussion for framing the political debate. And I think we've identified some drivers and I think we've identified some important questions that we've gotta grapple with as we are going forward. I also hope that you took to heart the comments of Maksud and Michael about seeking creative unorthodox solutions to some of these problems as we go forward in the debate. I personally also took to heart the earlier comments about human rights abuses. And with that in mind, although the program says we don't have a break here between now and the two-hour scenario, I feel we should. I'm getting a lot of support. This could be identity issues, could be ideological issues. Right. But I'm gonna go with it for self-interested reasons. So it's now about 10 o'clock. Can we reconvene here at two o'clock? Thanks. I'm sure. Gotta go to the court. That's right.


Hi guys, my name is Victor. I live in 50 kilometers of Paris in France And you're now watching Kroger Josh and his best friend is on YouTube Good morning, everybody. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. This guy has never seen a roundabout before. Okay He's kind of confused. You don't need to stop. There's no stop sign. If there's nobody here You just roll on around there, buddy Exy slammed on his brakes pretty hard there So we're in Balcony, Bologna, Saskatchewan I've already gone quite a ways. We slept in Saskatoon last night, so I've already come all the way down here and Just enjoying my morning until I realized hey, I haven't even said hi to you guys yet. So hello it's just a Tour across the prairies again today on our way home I'm gonna be home for quite a while after this trip about a week or so I think this truck has an appointment for a full service I've also got some oil I've got oil leaking out of my blow-by Which probably means that my Crankcase breather oil separator is a little gunked up. It's a little old and needs to be replaced That's a couple hundred dollar part and along with full service I'm already on it ever gonna get used to that So yeah, so this truck beats a couple of things looked at again I know it's been in the it's been in the shop a lot lately, but it's I haven't been spending a lot of money It's just been a lot of little things and this one could turn into a bigger thing I mean the only reason oil could be coming out of my blow-by is If the crankcase breather and oil separator Isn't working properly and it's instead of pushing oil back into the engine It's sort of gunked up and seized maybe and or almost seized or sometimes stops Filtering oil properly and then instead of putting the oil back into the engine It spits it out the blow-by to right on to the ground Canadian Thanksgiving, which will be next weekend or when you're watching this after you know, it's a little time after Get ready for some home time videos. I hope you guys still tune in lots of stuff going on at home We're in the left lane gang today We're going home That means we're Hammering down as hard as we can I'd like to get home before the Sun goes down But it's a race against time because the Sun goes down earlier and earlier days are getting shorter quickly You know, I'd like to sit inside one of those new volvos once You know, I've been harsh on Volvo said never Bible. I know speak out of frustration some days, but You know when the time comes I'm gonna hold on to this truck probably for at least at least another five years So I got a long time yet for Volvo to convince me that I should remain a Volvo driver You know these new trucks. They are actually really nice. I just wish that they'd have more of a classic model like they used to have the What was it called again the 880 Volvo 880, you know, I had the long hood. It's a really heavy truck though But they used to have more of a classic. Look, I don't know why they discontinued it. I guess they weren't making money or something. I Really wish they'd come out with a little bit more of a showy truck a little bit more of a classic truck Maybe they will in the next half decade But I know that these trucks are pretty amazing on the inside like mine's actually pretty small compared to some of these Volvos it's like driving a motel room or a hotel room around for the most part, so I don't know. I'll look into it when I Get a new truck, but I'm still shooting for the studio sleeper W900 Kenworth. That's the truck I want That is the truck I want. I want to get a used one I'm thinking in about five years. We'll see maybe a little more maybe a little less depends on How this truck performs, but I think I can get another five years easily out of this truck maybe more Maybe more I'm just over a million kilometers right now, so I do about 200,000 kilometers a year So you know in five years that's another million that'll be a two million kilometers And you know I can always rebuild the engine and this thing would be good for another two million kilometers after that as long as I maintain it you know Why buy a new truck and spend however many tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars when I have a truck that's working just fine, right? I mean, it's not the fanciest truck I got here It's a Volvo. I get it. I get on the first to admit.  It's nothing to show off, but it's mine It's working and only But another year and it's mine completely Maybe sooner trying to get it paid off sooner But I may just keep it see my truck is very much like this one on the right except mine is white Little bit of a shorter sleeper if you remember the last Volvo that we passed I had a much larger sleeper It was deeper longer and wider This is exactly like my truck They are good trucks. I mean and why do I want to buy a new truck, right? I'm on a crusade to pay off all of our debts like with most of the stuff we own a lot of stuff is all paid off already we got a couple of like my pickup and the the terrain and You know the house the stuff we got a couple of loans for paying off, but by the looks of it I mean we should be debt-free with on everything aside from the house in Five years Right, we just got the house. We could even have the house paid off in 10 years And once I buy a new semi truck then I've got that alone on top everything and then but you never know you never know like I Don't see debt as a bad thing I see it as a necessary thing, but it's something you have to be very careful with Whitewood's Saskatchewan At the co-op There's a petrol pass right across the street, but I think I'm gonna go to the co-op. I think I am cuz I'm already here Well, what's this over here electric charging stations no way check this out. We're gonna drive straight towards them Would you look at that Tesla charging stations? You can charge your electric vehicles here that's pretty cool So they're already putting in infrastructure out here on the prairies. Well, that's good That's good Because they got a lot of work to do like I've said in the past if they want us to use electric vehicles All right, cool I'm taking a closer look at those. I'm just gonna park the truck Fascinating Wonder how long it takes to charge So let's go check these things out. Hopefully my audio is not all messed up because sometimes when it gets windy now audio my audio gets a little messed up, but Check this out one two three four five six charging stations Tesla Look at that The prairies I wonder how long it takes operating temperatures Minus 30 to plus 40. Well, that's not good because it gets below minus 30 here So I guess in winter time on the coldest days too bad for you electric car owners. You can't charge your vehicles, but Fascinating that is brand new So what do you guys think about that? I'm glad that they're actually building infrastructure here on the prairies of Canada I thought this would be one of the last places that would see new electric Charging station infrastructure at a gas station. I guess it's an electric station now That is so interesting. My biggest question is how long does it take to charge your car?  So what are you gonna do? Just like surf Facebook on your phone while your car charges for eight hours or like you can't there's no Motels nearby you can go to no stores. No nothing I mean, there's a petro pass across the street there, but it's just it's just another convenience store, right? So my biggest question is how long does it take to charge if it takes less than 15 minutes? Hey, that's pretty cool As long as you can get about a 500 mile range out of that. That's good I mean, I'm all for the electric car thing. I just I have big Reserves about it because the electric car the batteries in the electric cars. They don't they're not as environmentally friendly as People say my phone making noises What in the world? That's someone was talking was a you diesel. That's almost talking to me They're not as environmentally friendly as they they make it sound because sure They're not putting emissions directly into the air out of the vehicle, right? But that power has to come from somewhere now. I don't know what Saskatchewan's main power source is I know in Manitoba. It's hydroelectric power. It's from big water dams up north. So that's pretty clean. It's pretty clean I mean like compared to coal or any other energy But if you spread this technology Worldwide and even across like the developed world a lot of that energy comes from coal Plants or other plants that produce a lot of emissions So really all you're doing is moving your emissions from coming out of your tailpipe to coming out of the stacks of the nearest Power plant where that electricity came from so really doesn't lower it at all and those batteries that they use in there They're lithium-ion batteries They only last a certain amount of time They don't last forever and then they become depleted and you can't use them anymore when they're depleted It's very hard to like you got to replace them Very expensive very expensive. So then you got to replace the battery the old battery It's very hard to dispose of it properly most times They just go into landfills on the other side of the world and sit there and they don't decompose they'll be there for tens of thousands of years just sitting there and less if we come up with a way of Reusing that material and who knows you know with seven billion people on the planet Maybe they'll come up with a way to reuse that and I hope they do because that's my main concern Is those batteries just go and sit in a landfill for the rest of eternity once they're depleted? And they don't even last that long they last what a few years and up here in the cold weather Especially in wintertime I can see problems with charging because it says it doesn't work below minus 30 It gets down well below minus 30 here quite often throughout the winter I don't know what we're gonna do then like what if that's your only source of transportation? Well too bad for you. You can't charge it here because you have to charge it somewhere else and There's there's several hurdles we have to get over but I think we can do it I mean and I think they could create an electric semi truck that doesn't look completely dumb and that actually looks pretty cool and Could be affordable maybe in the future like we got a lot of work to get there But I drive it I drive an electric truck as long as there was decent amounts of places for me to charge it that the charging Could be done efficiently and quickly Again with the problem with the batteries that they could last long you could have a long range like five to six hundred miles a day You know I'd buy an electric truck and if that's the direction the world's moving. Hey I'm okay with that I guess But there's a lot of infrastructure to be built and it seems like they've already started Here in Saskatchewan, and I'm I am genuinely surprised by that. I thought this would be like I said one of the last places To get something like this so I don't know how many Tesla owners are out here on the prairies But if there's at least six of you you can charge your cars all at the same time here at the co-op in Whitewood I Don't let me know your opinions on electric vehicles down below in the comment section What on earth is this? He's just giving her to Just giving her he can't see around that. He doesn't have mirrors. He doesn't know I'm coming What in the world that's a big scraper just a giving her So I posted that picture on Facebook just now those Tesla charge stations on a couple of you who own Teslas commented on there and The sounds of it those electric motors on these last about 1 million miles. This is about Brian Griffey that had told me this on Facebook Sorry if I pronounce your name wrong there Apparently those electric motors go up to 1 million miles and it's $6,000 to replace the battery pack That would be American I assume because he's in the US so probably about $8,000 Canadian He says you do lose some range in winter. He loses 5% of its stated range When it's cold outside, but I responded to myself. Well, what's cold to you because in the US? Cold to them is not always what we define as cold unless you live in like Montana, North Dakota And then you understand our level of cold And I'm wondering how will they even operate in negative 40 degree weather And he says his Tesla cost in 41,000 batteries are expected to last 300 to 500,000 miles so that's 500,000 to 800,000 kilometers that seems like a big stress because I was told that it wouldn't last that long when I looked into it Because I was looking into buying a Tesla a while ago, and they told me that they're expected to last five years Maybe that's wrong. Maybe that he owns one so what he should know more than me. I'll trust him I don't know. Maybe it's not as expensive to maintain a Tesla as I thought and you know, what if something breaks? Where do you go to fix it? Is there a Tesla dealership you got to go to and how much does that cost? Is it sort of like servicing a Ferrari? That's expensive So there's a lot of things that I got questions on it and maybe it's more affordable than I think But the simple fact is that they still don't produce a pickup truck that I like They do have some kind of truck in the works or something, but I think it looks ugly Looks like looks like a Jetson mobile or something. I Don't want it to look all futuristic. I just want to look like a nice square-body pickup truck. I Wanted a four-wheel drive good heating in the winter Guess we'll see what they come up with who knows if they're building these in Saskatchewan already Who knows maybe in a couple of decades. We'll all be driving electric vehicles. I Mean we're gonna have to really update our power grid for that and our electricity companies are really gonna Enjoy that, but hey, maybe with the increased volume of electricity that we're consuming Maybe electricity rates will go down That's a big maybe All right, heading way stopping at the flying J.  That's About a thousand kilometers little over 620 to ten and 30 miles All right. Oh the first one is open for us today. I'm going to pump number one numero uno.  We'll be at home in a few hours And I wasn't lying here we are Just putting this video together and then I'm gonna get it on the internet for you to watch Thanks for watching today hit the like button if you liked it hit the thumbs down if you thought it was Terrible. Let me know how I can make it better in the comment section down below The lock going on this week is gonna be a lot of going to be a lot of home time footage in the next coming week So just bear with me. Hope you guys still do tune in while it's going on around here behind the scenes and You know get a little bit of a different look at the life of the trucker when he's not on the road Talk to you later Hi guys, my name is Victor. I live in 50 kilometers of Paris in France And you're now watching Trucker Josh and his best friend is on YouTube


Hello, my name is Julie Doughty and I'm from Cardiff University School of Law and Politics and I'm going to be talking today about adoption of children from care and human rights. I'm not using any images with this broadcast so please feel free to turn your screen off and have a little bit of a rest from looking at screens and you can just listen to the audio version like a podcast. OK, so why do I want to talk about adoption of children from care? Imagine when you were growing up as a teenager finding out that the state had made an order removing you from your birth family permanently and transferring you legally into a brand new family that had no connection with yours beforehand. Imagine as a teenager all those questions about questioning your place in the world, your identity, who am I, where do I fit in, why don't I get on with my parents etc etc. Imagine all of that and then a whole extra layer of where do I come from, why did my family give me up, why did the authorities steal me from my parents, where are they, are they OK, what is there about my birth family that's within me that I'll never be able to find out about etc etc. And also for quite a number of children who are adopted they will have already had some adverse experiences beforehand that they might need some extra help with. Now however much you love your adoptive parents and however brilliant they are and most adopters are absolutely brilliant those are the sorts of questions that are going to be asked by young people as they grow up or even into adulthood. Did the state do enough for me and my birth family before they took me away and transferred me to a different family? OK, so this is a relatively controversial topic in the law of England and Wales because there is a perception that in England and Wales especially in England we use the mechanism of adoption against birth parents consent too often and more often than in other countries. And you can read useful reports by Clifent and Glyn about comparing our use of adoption in England particularly with other European countries. I'm not going to be saying a lot about birth fathers in this talk because there is already a talk on the Cambridge University web page here by Brian Sloane focusing on birth fathers so I'm not specifically going to talk about them today. And I'm basing most of what I'm going to say on an article that was published in the International Journal of Law Policy and the Family in 2019. What I'm going to be talking about is the law and also based on some of the data that we gathered in a study in Wales called the Wales Adoption Study. So this Wales adoption study is led by a colleague of mine in the School of Psychology in Cardiff University, Professor Catherine Shelton. And I hope that also on the Cambridge University web page you'll be able to access the list of the publications that have come out of that study. So we've got very many publications, articles and papers about all sorts of aspects of the Wales adoption study. Different themes and issues and different aspects of theory and practice. So that study, the Wales adoption study, was funded by the Welsh Government and the first stage of that study was about us reading the case records of 374 children. All of the children that were from Wales were placed with adoptive families in the year 2014 to 2015. And the overall purpose of the study was to look at the characteristics and experiences of those children, what their adoptive families support needs were in the stages of early placement and what factors help those children to flourish in the early stages of placement. And just to mention some of the characteristics of the children involved, that a quarter of those children had mothers who were themselves brought up in the care system, so that's an immediate indicator or suggestion isn't it of the state having let down those parents and those children. And about half of the children in the sample had suffered a higher level of what's known as adverse childhood experiences compared to the general population in Wales, which is at about only 14% compared to nearly half. So other aspects, it was a mixed method study involving social sciences, psychology and law. And one of the aspects we looked at in the legal side was the legal process that the adoptive applicants had to go through and how that experience may have affected their relationships with their children. As well as the case file study, we sent out questionnaires to survey adoptive families in the early stages and we originally had 96 responses to that survey. We've had other waves of surveys since then, always slightly smaller numbers for obvious reasons, that always happens with this sort of empirical research that the numbers decrease over time. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 40 adoptive parents. And we looked at in the case study, the case files are also the contact plans that were in the case records, the post adoption contact plans for those children. And what we found was that almost entirely the only contact plan that was made for those children with their birth parents was something that's known as letterbox contact, which is where there's an exchange of letters between the adopters and the birth parents. Although looking particularly at siblings, a third of the children we looked at were placed in sibling groups so they were actually placed together with their own brothers and sisters. And those of those who were placed separately and had siblings elsewhere, there were contact plans for 70% of those children, but of those only about 20% were there any plans for face-to-face contact. So the whole issue of keeping in touch with your brothers and sisters over the years is another really important one. Okay, so what is the law about adoption in England and Wales? It's governed by the Adoption and Children Act 2002 that came into force fully in 2005. We do have some divergence in law and policy in Wales now, but most of our law is still based on the 2002 Act. Now, to comply with Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, that's the right to respect for private and family life, the court's power to make an adoption order without a parent's consent must be exercised only when necessary. And under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, a birth parents consent can only be dispensed with when the welfare of the child requires it. So that is to comply with the necessity point in the European Convention. In a case a judgement delivered in 2012, YC against the UK, the European Court of Rights held that family ties can only be severed in very exceptional circumstances, permanently severed. Everything must be done to preserve and rebuild family relationships before getting to that stage. It is not enough to show that a child could be placed in a more beneficial environment than the one they're already in. But if the maintenance of those family ties would harm a child's health and development, the birth parents cannot insist that they are retained. In England and Wales, however, for a child to be placed for adoption, they will have had to go through care proceedings during which the local authority would have established to the court that the child was at the risk of significant harm if they remained at home with their parents. Also another European Convention case, European Court of Human Rights case, known as Kutsner KUTZNER against Germany, held that the state needs to show its offered support services to a family before being justified in removing children in that case because of the parents' poverty. Now, both parents' rights under Arsculate of the European Convention, there is a whole load of literature there about the requirement to look at the child's welfare and in exceptional circumstances to override the lack of parents' consent to the adoption, what's known in some quarters as forced adoption. But it's important to remember that adoption in England and Wales does go through due legal process. OK, what about any ongoing article 8 rights for the birth parents and the children? So traditionally, adoption was closed adoption in the sense that there was this completely artificial transfer of the child from one family to another. And until relatively recently, even keeping the whole situation secret, as though it was some sort of shameful secret to keep from the child, that's definitely changed over recent years and adopted parents are encouraged to bring up their child knowing that they are adopted and they go through very rigorous and it appears effective training before they become adopters to understand why that's important for the children and the birth family in general. But also adoption is becoming more open in the sense that there is this letterbox contact, although limited as it is, and encouraging encouragement of some face-to-face contact. Now, for practical reasons, that isn't happening as quickly as we might like. And what we found in the Wales adoption study was that there appeared to be a blanket policy of this letterbox contact of exchange of letters perhaps twice a year. More recent case, a judgement delivered in 2015 called REA, a High Court judgement. Mr Justice Peter Jackson, as he then was, held that following the adoption order, the mother in that case who was involved in letterbox contact, the birth mother, I mean, she was involved in letterbox contact but she was applying to the court under Article 8 for direct contact with her child. And Mr Justice Peter Jackson said that once the adoption order had been made, that the mother and child, the birth mother and child's article 8 rights were extinguished and therefore there was no ongoing claim possible under Article 8 to enforce face-to-face contact between the mother and the child. Okay, what about looking at children's rights and consent? Well, when an adoption order is being considered, the adoption agencies and the court must have regard to the child's welfare, must ensure that the child's welfare remains paramount and must have regard to a welfare checklist very similar to the welfare checklist, although there were some slight variations very similar to that in the children at 1989. And one of the items in the welfare checklist is that the court must have regard to the wishes and feelings of the child in accordance with their age and level of understanding. However, most children are adopted before the age of four, so their age in those circumstances means that there's some mislimitations on conveying their wishes and feelings about being adopted. With regard to contact, the welfare checklist also includes a duty on courts and adoption agencies to make decisions about the child's welfare throughout their life and to include the effect on them of becoming an adopted person. So this would suggest that local authorities, adoption agencies and courts need to consider long-term plans for what contact arrangements are going to be in place to meet the child's identity needs throughout their childhood and then to ensure their kind of healthy development into adulthood. I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. Under the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child, the child's rights continue after adoption, although their Article 8 rights have fallen away according to Mr Justice Peter Jackson. So that's the current understanding of the law there. So under the UN CRC, children's rights include rights to know and be brought up by their parents, rights to know their own identity and rights to be brought up within their own culture. So looking at it through the children's rights lens, looking at incorporating the UN CRC so far as we can within our own jurisdictions, it's important to think about a child's right to ongoing contact with the birth family, their siblings, their former carers. They could have formed a very strong attachment to form foster carers and that's something that needs to be handled carefully when they move on to an adoptive placement. All of this is really about helping the child form their identity within a stable and secure environment and that may require adoptive families to be able to access therapeutic and other support services. Okay, in our study in Wales, we noted some of the following points. I'm just pulling out some highlights here. There were shortcomings in the systems that were designed to give the child on their adopters' life story work in order to enable the adoptive parents and the children to share information about the child's history before they went into the adoptive placement as the child grew up and in later life. Adoptors tended to be sympathetic to birth parents rather than fearful or condemn nature of birth parents. However, letterbox contact wasn't easy to manage even when adopters saw it as important or as an obligation. Adoptors especially in general wanted to maintain and promote links between children and their siblings and extended family although they received little ongoing support to do that. And although we study in the Wales adoption study the early stages of placement, adopters appreciated that children's needs to understand their identity would probably develop and change in the future. But resources are very concentrated on the transition period around the court order being made and ongoing support is very hard to find and to access. OK, well I hope that short little snapshot and some snippets from our Wales adoption study have been helpful. And if you're interested in the study or interested more widely in children's rights and adoption then please do have a look at the reference list that accompanies this short talk. Thank you.


Hi, I'm Michael Todd, Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of California, San Diego in California, the United States, and it's quite an honor and indeed a privilege to have been invited by the organizers of this cost action to give some perspective on this research from my own work on structural health monitoring. That's particularly exciting because I think the topic of this cost action, the value of structural health monitoring is exactly the link that has not yet been explored in detail. Structural health monitoring is actually quite technically mature technology, however it's not in common practice I think in industry simply because we have not made the proper link of the business case in establishing the value of the kinds of information one can get from a structural health monitoring system and that is fundamentally the topic that this group is addressing. So it's quite a privilege to be associated with what I think is truly the absolute forefront of the structural health monitoring research field and what I hope comes out of this in addition to the obvious successes at propelling structural health monitoring into practice is some really substantive collaborations between the units here and the groups in the United States who are also working very hard in this area and I believe that's already happening. The networking I've made with many of the students and collaborators is exciting and we already have plans for future collaborations to advance this technology. So it's indeed an excellent opportunity and it's been quite a privilege to be here in beautiful Croatia to accomplish this work.


This is supposed to be Arabic. Well, to tell you the truth, I don't speak Arabic at all, but I do know a lot about it. For example, I know that adjectives follow their nouns, that the word order of Arabic is, Well, before I tell you, I'd rather invite you to find out yourself and welcome you to another truly exploratory online course, The Linguistic Fieldwork Course, VLC 403 Linguistic Fieldwork Arabic. Like all fieldwork courses on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, VLC 403 simulates this situation. You are stranded within a linguistically previously unexplored territory and you want to explore the language to which you are exposed. This is the classical fieldwork setup known since the heydays of Joseph Greenberg and Edward Sapir. By means of interaction with a native speaker who neither speaks nor understands your language, you want to find out as many details about his or her language as possible. In a real fieldwork situation, you collect your data in various live meetings with a native speaker. On the Virtual Linguistics Campus, we do it online, by means of a virtual speaker in various virtual settings where you can retrieve and explore the data by a mouse click. And this is how the content of VLC 403 Arabic, like in all other fieldwork courses on the Virtual Linguistics Campus, is organized. As usual, we start with a general description and the preliminaries that provide a general overview of the course including the prerequisites. The first content unit is theoretical and of utmost importance for all fieldwork activities. It discusses some general aspects of the language in focus and introduces the underlying methodology from phonetics to syntax and makes you fit for the exploratory part of the course. The core of the course are the fieldwork units, each with an exploratory part, the so-called virtual scene, which is dedicated to a particular topic. The first scene deals with simple objects. In our virtual interview room, you find the native speaker and a number of clickable objects with their audio and orthographic representation. Your first task is to transcribe what you hear as carefully as possible in order to develop a first sound inventory of the language in focus. Further scenes deal with number, with adjectives, for example the colors, with locative relationships and the organization of ad-positional phrases and even with sentences that are acted out by a second speaker. Starting with the second explorative unit, each unit has a hypothesis section where the previous assumptions and speculations are not only summarized but are also judged by the native speaker. All units or topics are activated in a successive fashion, that is in contrast to many other VLC courses you cannot access the units all at once but only successively. This guarantees that students first build their hypotheses before they see the solutions. For example, the unit number can only be accessed if two previous activities are completed and the subsequent unit adjectives is only available if vocabulary test. One is passed successfully and the exploration activity of the previous unit was marked as successful. But don't worry, each vocabulary mastery test where you can earn a digital badge is easy to manage. In each unit you find the complete list of vocabulary items that have been collected up to that point enabling you to practice and to prepare yourself for the test. The VLC fieldwork courses are true online courses. They do not involve any face-to-face tuition. Everything should be self-explanatory. However, it is recommended to use the repository forum in the class preliminaries to discuss questions with your fellow participants or even the social media. And on top of that, each fieldwork course has its customized workbook. It can be downloaded from the preliminary section and summarizes the main aspects of each unit in print, but even more importantly, it contains dozens of tables and charts where you can drop your data. Last but not least, the course is certified. Beyond the digital badges that you can obtain via the mastery tests, each fieldwork class is certified with a statement of accomplishment that lists the content and specifies the workload in hours. And as usual, course enrollment is simple. You only have to create your free VLC account first and then self-enroll to your fieldwork class by clicking on the course tile. That's it. And in the course you will be welcomed by the real native speaker. So that's it. See you in VLC 403 Arabic.


when a situation is going to present itself where life is literally in the balance and you have to make that decision whether you're going to act, whether you're going to intervene. And in this case, we're very fortunate that Sarfacaldi did just that. As was mentioned, Sarfacaldi on 4th of July was with his brother. They were enjoying some time on Lake Lanier. The unfortunate reputation of claiming more than 500 lives since it was built in 1926. The visibility is very poor in the water. There's a lot of underwater obstacles. So we had a situation where a couple on a jet ski, somehow that jet ski got flipped over and they were both in the water and neither one of them was wearing a life vest. And so Sarfacaldi and his brother were looking for a place to park for jet skis. They saw the folks onlookers on the beach looking at the couple, but nobody was intervening. And so he went over there and saw that the male in this case was really struggling, was exhausted, barely keeping his head above water. And so without any regard to his own safety, he moved his jet ski over there, got in the water to help the guy get him up onto the jet ski. And one thing that kind of stood out to me through this entire thing was that all the bystanders, I saw some shoes float in the water and I saw a crowd and that's kind of just what it's like, hey, that's not okay, something's wrong. But everybody on the shore was just video recording with their phones and stuff like that. And I know that without a doubt none of you guys would have done that. You guys would have intervened and done the same thing. So that's refreshing and yeah, that's all. I feel like I did it just what anybody else would do in that situation. Not necessarily a hero. There's a lot of people who were just standing by and they weren't intervening and I was just the guy that got the call and felt like I needed to. And I responded and intervened and did what I thought was best in this situation.


This one involves the Dominican junior record holder Carol Etienne, she'll run in lane number four as semi-finalist last year. Carol Etienne knows she has the quality to go significantly better this time around. Belongs to Ethons Athletics Club back in Dominica. Dominica just signing a new deal with ASICS earlier this week so they're kitted out in their brand new ASICS gear and of course she's at school in Jamaica. At Edwin Allen High School under the watchful eyes of fantastic high school coach Michael Dyke has coached so many fantastic Jamaican junior sprinters. Most recently the Clayton Twins Tia and Tina, Serena Cole as well just part of the long line of fabulous Edwin Allen in high school sprinters on the girls side. As we have a look at the lineup Jones of Bermuda goes in lane two. Shadeh John of Grenada in three. Carol Etienne is in four. 11-69 her best has the Dominican junior record was only a semi-finalist last year. There's Tobias of Trinidad and Tobago in lane number five that Zaya Tobias. Canitha Fraser of Guyana goes in six. The Guyanese number two. Norma Vinga of Martinique in seven and Kelanda King of the Turks and Caicos in lane number eight. Only Etienne in this field has gone under 12 seconds so makes her a massive favorite to qualify automatically for the final. I would back Tobias certainly to emerge from here. She's done really well at the schools championship in Trinidad and Tobago winning four gold medals for Scarborough secondary. Tobias in five. Once again four races at this stage of the under 17 girls 100 meters the winner of each to advance automatically to the final plus the next four best on times of course goes without saying I think. Confirmation of the first heat. Hingson 11.84 a negative 3.9 meter per second win. Guadaloupe's Saha second in 12.44 so well off the pace. Tell him to stride out here. Tell him to stride out. And there again we hear the chief starter Ludlow Watt telling giving instructions for the athletes to stride out. Not sure because now they have been sent to their marks. Second heat of the under 17 girls 100 meters. Winner sure to be in the final. We suspect Carol Etienne of Dominica with Tobias of Trinidad and Tobago expected also to go well. Well said. Etienne in four. Tobias in five. Very good start for the Grenadian John and John is going well now. Etienne steps forward. John has a problem and Etienne flies away from the field with Tobias coming through late but takes second position 12-0-1 the flash time for Carol Etienne. She came in as favorite and she delivered confidently. Strong run from the young lady from the Nature Isle. I think she's got a bit of green in her hair as well to compliment her brand new uniform. 12.05 confirmed as her time. So she'll go through as a heat winner but the 14-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago also with a fine run. We saw John there with a nice start but she looked as though she might have just had a little bit of a problem about halfway down the track Ricardo. Yeah very much the case. I think she felt something and that thwarted her progress as Etienne stepped away. Opened our season Etienne with a Dominican junior record of 11.70 as progressed to 11.69. 12.05 here in a negative 1.2 Tobias 12.50, Jones 12.75 for Bermuda and John 12.77 for Grenada. So as of right now that 12.75 is the bubble time.