Welcome everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon to those of you who are joining us from a different time zone. My name is Chris Bosley. I'm the director of the program on violent extremism here at the US Institute of Peace. I'm very excited and we're very excited for this virtual public event this morning, how rituals, rights and ceremonies can help with social healing after violence. I want to extend a very warm thank you and welcome to all of our panelists and a thank you to all of you who are joining us today. I also of course want to thank our partners in this endeavor, the Mertron Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University. So over the past several years now at USIP we've been developing a framework for how peace building can support communities that have been affected by people disengaging from violent extremism and who are reintegrating into and reconciling with local communities. What we try to do is to take violent extremism out of its securitized cage and to de-exceptionalize it from other forms of violence and violent conflict. One of the most important things that we found was that sustained positive and inclusive interactions between people disengaging from violence and local community members and institutions can help to build relationships and social bonds, generate a sense of belonging and ultimately offer an alternative identity with a social group that rejects violence. And transformational processes, rights and rituals can be powerful ways to do just that. Social rituals and ceremonies can be powerful. They can acknowledge and reflect a transformation away from violence and mark both for people disengaging from violence and for affected communities a new and more inclusive and nonviolent identity. Rituals can occur in a wide variety of forms. They can be formal or informal, but in any case they can begin to heal some of the psychosocial traumas and they can provide a pathway for moving forward together. Today's moderated discussion will dive into how these transformational processes take place, providing insight not only into different geographic representations of rights and rituals, but how they can help to transform relationships and identities and offer a safe space in the midst of or in the wake of conflict. It's my pleasure now to introduce and hand off the conversation to our moderator who quite literally wrote the book on Ritual and Peace Building, Lisa Shirk, over to you. Thank you so much, Chris. And good morning to everybody who's joining us online today. We have a fantastic panel who will really bring this down to the earth in terms of really fleshing out. What does this look like in practice to think about rituals, rights of passage, symbolic actions that involve our bodies, our senses, also our minds, but less so in the rational frontal cortex and more in the thinking about the emotional core of the brain. And how do these processes transform our identities, our relationships, and our worldviews. We'll begin today. Just briefly, I'll introduce the panelists and then hand off for short presentations and then we'll have a moderated discussion. So first of all, today we will have Pedro Valenzuela, who is a professor at the Universidad Javarriano, Colombia. Next we will have Oliver Kaplan, who's an associate professor at the Joseph Korbal School of International Relations at the University of Denver. And then we will have John Cocker joining us from West Africa, who is the executive director of Fumble Talk, a really fascinating organization working on the ground. Concluding remarks then by Dorothy Noyes, who's the director of the Merchant Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University. With that, I will pass it to Pedro for our first presentation. Thank you so much, Lisa, and good morning and good afternoon to all of you. I want to talk to you about an indigenous community, the nation, the Nasa Nation, who lives in the southwest part of Colombia, my country. It's an area that has been very much affected by the war, a lot of violence against civilians, all kinds of armed actors are present in the territory, the armed forces of the state, rebel groups, drug traffickers, right wing paramilitary groups. The communities have been very much affected by the violence in terms of displacement in terms of non-recognition on the traditional authorities, in terms of recruitment, sometimes voluntary, sometimes forceful, on the part of the various organizations. So the community has been engaged in the process of non-violent resistance for many decades now. And then they began to notice at some point that some of the youth that had left the community to join the armed organizations were returning to the territory. And I mean the territory, not the community. And the reason was that they came hiding. They were fearful of reprisals from the armed organizations that they had abandoned or being arrested by their Colombian authorities because they were not formally demobilized. And certainly perhaps while our work was more important, they were rejected by the communities. Once they leave the community to join the war, they lose the rights as member of the community and they lose the spiritual protection of the community. So they decided that they had to do something about these guys, these young people that were returning to the communities. And they created this program that they, and I quote here, in order to reintegrate those who did not heed the mandate of the elder spirits and spiritual authorities to resist their armed conflict and not to be an instrument and part of it. So they created this program that perhaps we call reintegration, but they call it reharmonization. And the reason is that the NASA people believe that we are born, when we are born, nature assigns to us the territory to live in. And the fact that we stay in that territory means that we live in harmony. So abandoning the territory means that you are creating an imbalance within the individual that leaves the community to join the war, but also within the family, the society and the universe as a whole. So they have created this program of reharmonization. When you become this harmonized, that means that you have lost your identity, that you have lost your spirituality, and that you have lost the sense of belonging to the community and to the territory. So reharmonizing means that you have to return to these people, the sense of identity and the sense of spirituality in order to reestablish harmony within the individual, the community and the society as a whole. Now the process began by what they call a spiritual analysis. And this is a process where the spiritual authorities try to determine whether these people are ready to be part of the community once again. And in this process what they determine is their real commitment, what is the reason that they have returned to the territory and the community, but also they try to determine the types of illnesses that they have brought with them from the war. And by illnesses they mean any evil at the spiritual or the physical level that they acquired when they were in the war, particularly if they engage in actions that as they refer to them, contravene the loss of the culture and the loss of nature. And among them they include murder and they include rape. So it's a very long process. It takes about three years for these individuals to be completely accepted in the community back again and to reacquire all the rights and their spiritual protection. Now, if you are not accepted by the elders and the spiritual leaders and the community, you of course cannot come back to the community. It has to be a decision that is taken jointly by the spiritual authorities and by the community as a whole, because they determine the degree of damage that has been caused by the imbalance or this harmony created by these individuals living in the community. So they decide, you know, they design specific programs according to the individual needs and ills that these people have brought back from the war. I know that I don't have time to go into the specific details of the program of what we would call reintegration. So let me just tell them perhaps in the conversation we can go a bit deeper into it. They based the programming on the basis, they based it on three principles and those principles are spirituality, solidarity and sense of belonging to the territory and respectful use of Mother Earth. So those around those three principles, they have created the program of reintegration. It shares some commonalities with programs of traditional DDR programs advanced by the Colombian government and by the international community, but it is very much mediated by the local culture and the local traditions of that community. So they cooperate with state, but they have their own elements that makes the program rather different economically in educational terms than the regular programs. So the thing I think to remember is that these spiritual rituals try to reharmonize these individuals before they are fully accepted into the community. And I don't know Lisa, if that's my time, I think it is. So I give it a done and perhaps we can go elaborate further throughout the conversation. Yes. Thank you very much. And that was very interesting. And we look forward to hearing more of those details. Oliver Kaplan, I'll pass the floor to you. Great. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. And it's great to be here. And thanks to USIP and the Merchan Center for hosting us. It's also a pleasure to be on the panel with Pedro, who also had the good fortune of having him as my book translator. So hello, Pedro and greetings from early morning Denver. And so today I'd like to talk a little bit about different rituals and social ceremonies that I've come across in my research in Columbia, looking at three different examples. And the first example actually is across national example, looking at a focus on DER or reintegration programs for ex combatants. So a first aspect of my research that I think fits really nicely with this topic is I'm finalizing work on a database on DDR programs around the world. And one of the interesting things that has come out of that data is that around 30% of DDR programs around the world actually have community based or community focused programs to also engage community members. Some of these programs may be spiritual, but they're not spiritual per se, but they're either working toward some kind of conflict transformation at the end of conflict or some kind of reconciliation between victims and ex combatants. And they can involve ceremonies, community programs, dialogue between combatants and victims. Probably some of you have seen these a lot of times in terms of ritual or ceremony. They may they may just involve joint activities together, like doing a public works project, competing in sports arts activities, things like that. And so I think that's an important example and it just it speaks to the to the fact that, you know, sometimes these rituals that they may be traditional or spiritual and sometimes they may they may not be. Then I'd like to move to a specific example that I've seen in my field research in Colombia. It's a community that I've studied very closely known by its Spanish initials, the ATCC, or the peasant workers Association of the Carare River. It sits about 100 miles north of Bogota actually somewhat close to where Pedro is right now and Pedro has looked at this community as well. And in my book called resisting war, I have a chapter on this community and one of the really interesting things they developed were these community procedures to dialogue with armed groups to protect individuals who are under threat. And this includes individuals who are ex combatants or individuals fleeing from the armed groups who want to leave the conflict. And so this community developed a really interesting process.  And so the elder conciliators of this community or the conciliators would dialogue with the armed groups in the region to get to a packed a secular social process where they would vouch for the suspected and collaborators of an armed group or the former combatants who were trying to leave the armed group to guarantee. That those individuals with social pressure will stay on the on the right side of the law will not become recidivists. And if they were to become recidivist the packed often involves some kind of out group punishment where the armed groups would maybe then take out some kind of some kind of punishment. So I was able to study this very deeply in Columbia. But of course, this process occurs in various communities around the world. We've seen this in Afghanistan. In fact, where US and ISAF forces were engaging with local communities with local shuras to implement these kinds of vouching and verification mechanisms. So these kind of rituals that everybody sees that create common knowledge about what the expectations are for these individuals and they reframe that frame them again once again as civilian noncombatant members of these societies. So something sort of similar to what Pedro told us about in terms of the indigenous groups with a related process. And then a third strain of research I've been looking at, which also just mentioned briefly is a new working paper called superstitions and war looking at superstitious and religious beliefs in Columbia. And based on some survey research and I just like to share a little bit of information about how some of these beliefs shape individuals views about reconciliation and resilience. And one of the individuals I interviewed in Columbia speaking about an instance where their community came together to pray and the people felt that it protected the town from attack. A man said faith is a very powerful weapon that belief in safety could protect the town. And so, and I recently conducted some surveys in Columbia with colleagues and he asked about a number of different supernatural beliefs and phenomena that people believed in. So ranging from things as simple as beliefs and ghosts and miracles to rights of priests who might be able to purify the soul of an excombatant who had committed some kind of harm to how to get through difficult trauma to whether people believe praying to protect their town might might actually be helpful. And the interesting thing in the results I'll just summarize them but in the sample from anywhere from 20 to 70% of individuals affirmed at least one of these beliefs and many of them affirmed various beliefs at various levels. And so some of the just to sum up some of the findings, you know, the people who have a belief that, you know, believing in in in God or higher power can help with trauma, we're more likely to say that they could cope with the daily challenges of life, including challenges related to the uncertainty of armed conflict. A number of people who felt that praying could protect their town were more likely to be resilient in the sense of staying in their towns when there might be a perceived threat from the armed conflict, and would similarly be more likely to return to their recommend that someone returned to their community, if they had previously been displaced. And so, you know, these findings I think sort of speak at the individual level to why people benefit so much and participate in these, these types of social and community collective rituals. And so, you know, just to sum up I think, you know, I've given you some examples from Columbia, but I've done some reading and looking at other cases in this stuff. It occurs around around the world, you know, these kinds of rituals and beliefs and so in different in different forms, of course, but, but, you know, a growing really grow interesting and growing area of research. So anyway, thank you all for having me and look forward to the questions. Thank you so much. That was fascinating. And again, that that role of rites of passage and rituals to help ease the transition from war to peace, or reintegration after violence. These are exactly the kinds of things we're looking at today. Let me pass it next to John Cocker again from fumble talk. Thank you very much. Good afternoon from Sierra Leone. Good morning wherever you are. I'm really pleased to be part of this panel to share my experience. I will say my talk will be mostly on my practical experience as head of family talk, which is create for family talk. I'll give I'll give a brief background and then talk about the program itself which use tradition as a way to facilitate healing and reconciliation after our brutal war. And with the challenges, you know, mostly the tensions between between the tradition, culture and respect for human rights. For the background, Sierra Leone experience a very brutal civil war that lasted about 11 to 12 years. And a way to bring the war to an end, the negotiating parties agreed on the truth commission and later on a special court to try those would be at the greatest responsibility. These are institutions that we are situated within the context of transitional justice. And closely with the truth commission, but at the end of the process there are a series of gaps, you know, most terral unions did not have the opportunity to participate in the truth commission for some logistical reason, you know, by then the war was not completely access to the community and few mistakes, you know, by the commission, such as the same testimony taking instead of, you know, minor things but at the end of the day, as one of the civil society champions, I was still concerned that the people of Sierra Leone had not had the chance to have a conversation around what happened. So I reached out to one of my friends who later introduced me to a philanthropist who was willing to give us a try. So first, I told my partner we cannot come up with a one year concept note. We need to consult with the people of Sierra Leone. First to checking do they want to reconcile. Second, how do they want to go about it and what exists in their community and how can we accompany them. After the first few consultation, it was clear, people wanted to reconcile, but they wanted to use their own tradition. They have their own tradition of healing, you know, working with their own cultural sensitivities, you know, as a way to communicate to their ancestors. And what we did was to accommodate these people. And during this process, we realized that a, you know, unlike the truth commission, we're in you have to move people from point A to point B, these people were willing to come forward on their own. They were willing to say things that you will not steer to say outside of their sacred space. You know, they worked around what we describe as the bonfire. You know, the bonfire is the sacred space. You know, we are in the people we the people are able to really come forward to acknowledge what they've done, you know, to ask for apology, you know, to say things that they will not say outside of that. And after the bonfire, they have their own traditional ceremonies.  Some they have their own little shrine in the middle of the town where they communicate to their ancestors. In other communities, they will offer Muslim and Christian prayers. You know, in other communities, they want to just communicate to the ancestors, you know, to invoke the spirit of the ancestors to church the minds and hearts of those who have been taught to start the journey of forgiveness. So this was a shot what we are coming over half of Sierra Leone, you know, at a particular time we were able to facilitate over 250 bonfires, we're in people who are able to accuse their chiefs, who they will not dare to question what they did during the war. You know, and also, you know, in some communities, people who killed their loved ones, those who burned the only community center, we are able to come forward to ask for forgiveness because they believe in the process. They know they are not only doing this as individuals, they know it's been done in the presence of their ancestors, you know, the community spirit and everything. But our approach was situated within the context of the answers are there. We did not go into these communities to tell them what to do. What we simply did was to facilitate the conversation to get them to identify what exists in their communities and how to bring that out. I was a little bit concerned with the human rights aspect, because as a human right advocate, you know, on issues like the role of women, you know, women suffer the brunt of the civil war, but then part of the tradition does not allow women to sit in with men to have this conversation.  And I think it's important for them to be part of the discussion. So gradually, the women were able to carve out their own space, you know, which later became the peace mothers. So like a women solidarity group to talk about their issues to discuss their challenges, all within the context of their tradition and their culture. It's important to note that our role was not to tell them what to do, it was just to facilitate, you know, to have the process to invite, to help to organize. But at the end of the day, it was the community themselves. We worked, you know, in one section, it will take about three to four months to facilitate the process before they have that bonfire. And during the bonfire, those who've committed atrocities, those who are acting of forgiveness will come forward to commit to the journey to reconciliation. It is the beginning of the long journey. Now, I would say that ceremony helps to bring everyone together. It becomes the responsibility of the section of the village to accompany the individuals. You know, when they walk to the stream, they see someone who testified, whose story they've had, they will tap them on the shoulder. It's okay. God is in control. Things will get better. You know, that little tap goes a long way. Having, you know, surrounding themselves to have the ceremony. These are all issues that really help to bring harmony within the communities. There was one ex-combatant who committed heinous crime. He was referred to as Mr. Dai. He did 80 years in prison. When he came back, he came to us to facilitate his return to his village. Even though I told him, look, you stand in risk of being indicted at a special court, he said, if that is all he wants, it's just to talk to his people. He does not care. So at the end of the day, we were able to facilitate the return of savage to his village, but it's within the tradition, their culture, respecting their tradition. And as I said, it differs from village section to section. Now I'll end with the challenges. That is, you know, for some of us who look at the content of respect for human rights and having a tradition that has existed for hundreds of years, it was a little bit of a challenge. But because of our approach, because of the trust we have to develop in these communities, people were willing to adjust their programs a little bit to accommodate respect for human and people's rights. That is the role of Chilean.  You know, they have their history because in some instances, if I come to you to ask for apology, and then I was wearing blue and I come back to you three months later. You know, you've agreed to forgive me. And then I'm wearing blue to visit you. You will think I come to provoke you. So there are structures in place at the community level that I can go to, or the victim can go to, to say John is wearing blue to come visit me. Why did we have blue? You know, and then they will invite us under the peace tree to talk. Maybe it's my best dress. Or maybe I was under the influence of drugs when I was committing those atrocities. So basically, through the people themselves, we were able to design a program that respond to their needs. But having children to sit in those meetings was also negotiated, because we said, when the war was raging, children were not asked out of the war. They suffered. So when we're looking for the solution, it's important for them to sit in. And I might not think like even agree on the date. You know, in our culture, the children should give the date, should suggest a date. We said, please, can you suggest the date in the, in a town hall meeting where everyone had the opportunity to say yes or no to. So these are minor things, but they go a long way in integrating respect for human rights at the same time, respecting the ownership of the program and ensuring that the people are at the center of the design of their own healing and reconciliation. I'm sure I'm going to be on my time. Thank you very much. I look forward to some answers. Thank you so much, John. That was really fascinating and really an important conversation on how traditional structures have come to meet the demands of a truth and reconciliation process. And in each of the presentations, we heard about how cultural rituals that have an ancient history within a community are being used and blended with peace process steps and stages like DDR and like TRCs. So there's sort of a traditional and improvisation element to the rituals that each one of you were discussing. We've had a number of questions come in from the audience, and I want to invite everyone else online who's joining us today to submit your questions through the Zoom link below. But let's go to the first question, which really has to do with questions of justice and accountability in these processes. So we heard about, you know, people being reintegrated that had committed murder and rape. And John, you just talked about sort of the standard now of inclusion of women in peace processes and then necessity of that from a human rights women's rights point of view. How, how did you see in each of these cases that you discussed sort of the issue of justice and accountability being addressed. Thank you. That's at the front and center of most of our discussion. Now, I will say this, and I mean, I'm sorry in advance I might, I might put some people, but it's important to note who how we define justice. Who defines justice in a village in a cultural setting. We've had a special court that meets international standards that spent close to 500 million dollars to try 10 people. And we've had a nation that is in darkness for years, people who suffer during the war amputees were sent back home, given a sharp notice you either go home or will demolish the camp. In that context, who defines justice in our work. What we saw and realize was it's up to the people to define justice and for example, the naming and shaming. When you have someone come in front of the community to either apologize what he or she has done. That apology goes a long way to inducting not only the individual, but inducting the family. We look at family context. So when you come forward, it means you've embarrassed your family, you embarrass your society, and it becomes a responsibility for you to reform and try to avoid such situation moving forward. And sometimes we don't know what they go through within that context of coming in front of a whole community. Hundreds of people to acknowledge what they've done it's it's punishment in itself. But I also don't want to judge who is right and who is wrong, but within our work, it's up to the people to decide what is justice. And again, for some communities, you know, initially, I was worried that rape issues should never form part of the reconciliation program.  I was so worried, you know, I talked to my staff, what do we do? I asked them to go and consult with the people, what is the way forward, because I will not condone this type of work. But at the end of the day, the people said, help us to work to come together. And that was how the Peace Mother, the Women's Support Group was established as a support group to those who suffered sexual violence, those who were victims, to come together to identify what to do to move forward. And now they are mostly involved in livelihood activities. So I will not comment too much on the definition of justice. And I will not say we get it right or get it wrong. But within our context, we left that to the eyes of the people to define their own justice. Because we know several millions of Saralunians will not usher themselves with $500 million to be spent to try to adjust 10 people when the country was in darkness. So it's a difficult one, but that's my response so far. Thank you so much. Pedro, Oliver, do you have something to share on justice and accountability? Pedro? Well, yeah, there's a little bit of what John was saying as well in this community. I know that since they have the wrong legislation and their own systems of justice that sometimes contradicts the legal system of the country. There's been a lot of controversy, for instance, that the NASA people have punished somebody who committed murder by, I don't know the word in English, but taking a whip and whipping him, I guess. And of course the criminal code of the country demands much more than that. But it is very appropriate in the cultural context of the community, they consider that's an appropriate type of a sentence. So I know that there are these contradictions with the rest of the country. But I'm not sure as to the specifics, because I know that when they do this ritual to assess the illnesses that these people have brought, they specifically mentioned to me rape and murder. But I don't know if they, if they treat it in a very different way that they treat any other illnesses. And again, because of the very heavy involvement of the family and the rest of the community, they seem to emphasize more the sense of reestablishing the unity of the community. In order to resist the war and to resist so many aggressions from the broader society, that perhaps they tend to emphasize that. But since I'm not a member of the community, they have not been that specific in terms of the punishment of these types of crimes. So I'm sorry I cannot add much more than that. Oliver, do you have anything to add on that? Sure, I'll jump in for a moment and just to follow up on Pedro's comments and some related work I've looked at. Indigenous spiritual elders and their role in sort of maintaining cohesion in their communities. And some of the other communities I've looked at, not the NASA, but the Embera and others, they also set up a punishment system. Often they'll create these holding cells or the Colt Calaboso and they'll hold a dungeon, they'll hold the individuals who are parts of the armed group. So they will pay a sentence or a punishment, but as Pedro brought up in a place like Colombia, there's sort of this tension between the Indigenous justice systems, which the Indigenous groups in Colombia have an autonomous legal right to use and the mainstream state Colombian justice systems. So in these kinds of cases dealing with Indigenous groups, you get into some kind of challenges meshing the two systems. Then I was going to just briefly follow up on the issue of what happens in the case of the Pes Worker's Association. They have sort of an interesting process in terms of dealing with justice. If I recall, in the cases where some kind of grave crime or harm violation that's happened against another member of the community, for example, that kind of thing would usually be assessed by the community, but then it would be sent usually to the normal justice system to the police. But one of the things that they were trying to do was to create an acknowledgement of any types of harms or bad behavior being involved with a conflict that would occur. So if there was someone who was accused of helping an armed group or someone who had been a member of an armed group, I believe that they would have to sort of come forward and acknowledge and accept that they had been involved with that kind of behavior. And the real power that the community brought was their networks of information. So they usually would know all of this because they had done their own investigation, they'd drawn on their own networks to identify what these individuals had done. And so they would say, look, we know what you've done. So you should just come clean and say what you've done. And really the purpose of this was to show that they had acknowledged that their behavior, that they were going to correct their behavior, and really to buy, the way that I've thought about this is really they're trying to buy these individuals second chances so that they can, you know, they've done their sort of confession, maybe atonement, but then they have the second chance to rejoin society under vigilance, under watch. And so the idea there is to kind of, I think, you know, Chris may have used the word to destigmatize these individuals. That's precisely what the community by vouching for them is trying to do. But then also letting them know that they're on notice in that there are certain expectations, social expectations involved about about their future behavior. Thank you so much. There have been several questions. Yeah, go ahead. Just quickly, I mean, it's important to note that, you know, going through this process is not just creating another layer of stigma, it's helping to restore their dignity, because it's sort of destigmatizing these families that were known to be associated with that wrong. So it's also important that most of these offenders work very hard in these communities to help to restore their dignity. They participate in community farms.  So they have the opportunity to restore their dignity. I just wanted to add that to this discourse. Thank you. I think that's fascinating, John. And I heard, you know, this sort of the theory of ritual and rites of passage are that you especially around reintegration after violence is that you actually sort of create a situation where the truth comes out. As you said around the fire, the women were naming the rapes by the elders and by the leaders in the community. But it doesn't just stay there. It sort of boils in the pot like sort of like this is the horror that happened. And then there's the reintegration and the destigmatization and the commitment to dignity and social cohesion. So the ritual, it's a rite of passage from sort of ignoring the harms to facing those harms and really sitting in the fire of the horror that happened. And also then moving on. So there's this transformational arc through these ritual processes of symbols of people's bodies releasing the tension and the anger and allowing that reconciliation to happen. Several of the people who are watching today have asked, you know, what is, is there in a way to evaluate what has happened? Is there social cohesion within these communities, between communities? One person asked, you know, has fictive kinship such as Kampadrasco, I am assuming that's a Colombian term, being, you know, sort of being chosen for baptism and marriage. Do you see this type of indicator that transformation has happened occurring sort of after some of these community rituals? Yes, yes, most definitely. And I think that, for instance, the work of Oliver Kaplan, with another author and with the Lucio, have, you know, recovered or have identified the value of the fact that this community did stay in the territory. They were not permanently displaced. So they were, they managed to maintain some of the cohesion throughout the war, despite all the impact, negative impact that they were at. So the authorities remained in place, the communities remained in place. If they were displaced, it was just temporarily they came back to the territory. So when these people returned to the communities, they do find a very cohesive type of society. And therefore, you know, the whole community determines what needs to be done for them to be reintegrated. I want to emphasize one, one aspect that I think it's important that makes it different from the traditional DDR processes offered by the Colombian state and the international community very often. And that is one of the things that they, they recognize the importance of the economic aspect of the people who are returning to the community, but they vehemently refuse to accept the type of training that the Colombian state offers in order to incorporate these people to the capitalist labor market. So for them, that is a normal. They say we are training these people to become workers in whatever enterprises you want to promote. And that is going to truncate the process. They also, for instance, don't accept the offers to be reintegrated into new or existing armed forces. And one of the reasons is that they say that, you know, they don't want these people to provide information about the war because that means that they are not completely disengaged from the war. So they reject all those types of things precisely in order to maintain community cohesion. The educational component of the program, for instance, although it is traditional in a sense that they try to teach you some, some craft, for instance, but basically is to make, to make you recover the memory of what being an asset means and how to think again and feel again like the elders do. The program of the social component of the program, of course, is some sort of retribution to the community for the damage that was done. And therefore, even though they are given a plots of land, the productive projects that are undertaken, they are for the benefit of the whole community. And of course, there's also a political component in the sense that these people, as perhaps to reestablish a sense of dignity, as John was pointing out, they have to participate in the political activities of the community. And by that, really what they are trying to achieve is for these people to recover their sense of collective subjects. So there's all kinds of elements there that really contribute to maintain the cohesion of the community and to reestablish the cohesion with the people that abandon the community to join the war. Thank you. John or Oliver? Yeah, maybe I'll just follow up real quick and then turn it to John because I actually have a question for John on this as well. But I think one of the things we see in a lot of conflicts either with evidence or just argument is that war can be extremely destructive to social ties and to social cohesion. And yet when we think about reintegration, we believe that the social cohesion is necessary to enact these types of rituals and ties. So it kind of creates this dilemma of how do we do this? And some of my research on Indigenous groups in Columbia, I've looked at the role of spiritual elders and how this varies across communities and more at a statistical level, looking at how many people would traditionally visit their spiritual elders, their shamans, their teguas, different words for the spiritual elders and how much confidence would they have in those elders which would give them then the authority and respect to be able to have that spiritual power and enact these kinds of rituals. And the thing that I saw is that this can vary greatly across communities for various reasons. I mean, it could be because of the conflict, it could be because of trends of assimilation or cultural destruction, all kinds of reasons why you get that kind of variation. But that, in one sense, creates a variation in community capacity and I think Pedro referenced the other publication that I have where my colleague Enzo and I looked at community social cohesion or community receptive capacity, the ability, the presence of local cohesion and community councils to accept these ex-combatants who are leaving the conflict and maybe you're looking for a place to affiliate. And if they don't have a civil society place to join and affiliate, let's just say there's no game in town, who are they going to look to? They're going to look to their old comrades of war to join those processes. And so that capacity, it doesn't necessarily create rituals or ceremonies for these individuals, but without it, I think it's very hard to have those rituals and ceremonies. And so I actually wanted to turn it over to John and also ask you across communities in Sierra Leone, I'm sure there's variation in terms of participation and level of engagement and maybe you can speak to that as well. What do you see? Yes. Thank you again. Well, first, I agree with you. There's variation even within the village or section themselves in terms of what to do and how to go about it. But also, you know, you ask the question in terms of evaluation. How do we assess if there's transformation happening after the ritual? I will say yes. For us, we use different indicators. These are practical indicators. For example, just after the war, some communities were going through difficulties, their harvest was not good, et cetera, et cetera. But when they had the opportunity to go through their ceremonies, to communicate to their ancestors, to their spiritual elders, the following year they had one of the best harvest. You know, we were there, we witnessed it. You know, and the proceeds from those harvest, they were able to use as a community. You know, there's also the issue of social cohesion. You know, community cohesion. The people who, you know, these ex-combatants before this program were not willing to live in the village because the DDR program had some challenges because in the DDR, the integration component was not done on an equal footing. You know, at the end of the war, you know, the offenders were put in vehicles, they were given toolkits, they were given clothes, they dress well, and they brought them to the village with vehicles so I know like they imposed them on the people. So the people received them in the presence of the stakeholders, but that was it. They did not integrate, they were not able to hang out, they were not able to talk, they were not able to meet. In the morning, community members would go back to their farms and they were in the big towns. So basically they had to come back to the city and then to start another group called the Okada Riders. So what we've seen is when they had this opportunity, they are able to stay in the communities. They are able to offer their service to work in these communities. So I will say it's mostly the approach to this process and we are mindful that it's not one size fits all. Allow the people to decide what suits them. Allow the people to determine who should be involved and how to go about it. It's more about the process that is our niche to facilitate the healing and reconciliation in these communities. Thank you so much to all of you. I want to point out there is a new book about Fumble Talk called The Answers Are There, which is really what John has been talking about, that the community has the answers in terms of when ritual should happen, how it should happen, what justice looks like. The answers are in the community and too rarely I think people in the international community recognize the expertise, the wisdom, the traditions that are already present in communities that can be supported from the outside but cannot be led by the outside. I want to remind all of our participants joining. There's many of you online today watching the webcast. There is a survey link at the USIP page where this event is being broadcast. We're asking all of our participants who are watching and participating today to fill out that survey so that we can have your thoughts and your insights. With that, there's been a number of other questions come in. We're still looking at one of the indicators of success because especially funders like to see how do we measure and how do we invest in rituals and rites of passage, which are not a traditional way that international funders think about supporting community reconciliation. But there's a question about timing, which I think also comes from a funder's mindset in terms of, you know, when is the best time to start thinking about supporting a community based ritual or rite of passage in the aftermath of violence? Do any of you have thoughts on timing?   Thanks, John or Pedro. Okay, I will say it depends on the people. You know, like many other things, it's important to engage the people, we should not assume that they are not ready or they're ready.  You know, failing to engage the people from the inside. So maybe it will have been appropriate for us as a nation to start that process right there, just at the end of the war. But then the expert said it has never happened, it will not work. So they invested in what they know has happened and worked in other places, but did not work in our context. So I will say, I will leave that question to the people who are affected for them to determine when they are ready without imposing on them. If they say they are not ready, leave them because that's also how we approach our work. When we go to a community, the first step is to have stakeholders consultation where we introduce ourselves, we introduce the work we do, and ask them if we are invited or welcome to work in their community. And we make it very clear that we will not be offended, we will respect their wish if they choose that they are not ready for us, we will just leave. But you know, just that simple action goes a long way. I remember when we conducted the consultations, one woman stood up in front of the gathering. When we asked, do you want to reconcile? She said, yes, we want to reconcile, but no one have ever asked us if we want to reconcile. So you see, just that action goes a long way to generate that motivation, that enthusiasm for them to come up with how they want to go about their own process. Thank you, Pedro. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a process that is determined by the internal dynamics of the community. And of course, the case that I have commented on refers to individual people living there on the wall. So I imagine, so it took them a very long time for them to decide exactly what to do. The community itself did not know exactly what to do. And in fact, they asked for advice from the Colombian government. So there was a process there of feeding each other on different experiences to come up with the program. As I mentioned in the beginning, they don't reject completely some aspects of traditional DDR. But those were individual processes. And I imagine that with the recent process of demobilization of the FARC, which was a collective process, I don't know exactly how many indigenous people from that community demobilize. And so the needs will be different. And my feeling is that it should be immediate because they are in entire need of that. Thank you so much. There's been a question that comes in that gets back to the question of shame and stigma, particularly from families. There are times when individuals are being accepted back into communities through these rites of passage or ritual processes, but are still rejected by their own families. Have any of you seen that? That is a very interesting question because it has happened. And there are some resentment on parts of the community of certain benefits that accrue to the individualized people. But they realize also that a lot of the female members of the community who left the community did because of family reasons, problems, internal violence within the family, etc. So they have come now, they have brought the families to the whole process. So there is a process of individual healing and family healing and community healing, etc. And they have recognized how important the woman or the family is because because certain relations where they were caught off between the family and the individuals. Thank you. John, did you have something to add or it's okay if you don't. No, I mean, of course, I'll be happy. You know, the issue of stigma to us, it's seen more within the context of restoring dignity.  So going through this process is an opportunity to reclaim your dignity, to explain your side. And, you know, the offenders mostly saw this as an opportunity to explain their own version, they never had that opportunity to tell the community what they were going through, who recruited them, what the state of mind they were in, you know, and what they've done, even though they did that as individuals was associated to their family.   You know, I'll give one example in one community where, you know, one guy who committed one of the worst crime I've ever observed, you know, observed. But he was not available. So many community members pointed fingers at him that he was responsible for the killing of their loved ones, XYZ. So it took on the family to work with our staff to travel around the country because they wanted to give him the opportunity to come and apologize. So the whole family will regain their dignity, even though we never saw that individual, but it just shows that, you know, it's not like the family is concerned about stigma. The family sees this as an opportunity to really work very hard to reclaim their status in the community as a law abiding on respect to family. So that is the context in which things happen in Sierra Leone, but I must say it might differ in other contexts, but for us, it's rooted within the family setting and knowing that, yes, it takes the village to raise the child and also we had a blanket amnesty for crimes committed during the war. It's important to just situate that context. Thank you for that. That goes back to the earlier question about justice and accountability. Oliver, let's turn to you. There's been several questions that came in regarding sort of what is the advice for international organizations, be they donor countries or international NGOs. So what is your advice on how they can incorporate this understanding that that peace processes DDR truth and reconciliation processes can have this community ritualized right of passage symbolic process that happens within communities. How should they think about this how should they approach it. Great, I get the easy question. So, so yeah, I think this is always the question on on the top of our minds, you know, what can you know we all want to help what what can we do and I think one of the points that was already made which is really important is that, you know, on some level, you need some welcoming of the local communities. On the other hand, as John pointed out, and I think it's also true, you know, by going in and initiating contact, you might be able to open up possibilities where there previously weren't ones. And so I think there, you know, there is a bit of attention there about, you know, how much you defer to a place that maybe needs a nudge in some way to get the conversation started. So, you know, I've looked at a bit at how NGOs and other and other international actors have come in to try to support different processes including actually while I was at USIP I was doing research as well with the International Committee of the Red Cross looking at how they've supported different communities. And I think, you know, one of the key things we've already touched on is that, you know, war can be destructive to community capacity and cohesion. And so it could be the case that especially in these post-conflict settings that have already gone through these traumatic experiences that the outside support to rebuild some ties could be helpful.  So I think that that could be very, very important. In addition, you know, I think the thing, the thing I've seen is really coming up with a menu of options that can be shared with different communities. And so I think in the space of, you know, rights and rituals. And I think even, you know, Pedro referred to this where, you know, the NASA Indigenous group, they had a dialogue with the government to sort of get some input on what might be good. And then they can figure out, based on their own community processes what to adapt. But, you know, I think whether it's nonviolent strategies for protection, or maybe examples of different rituals and processes that other communities have adopted, you know, I don't know if that, you know, such a list really exists at the moment, but that might be something that we work toward where, you know, we have these examples and say, you know, people seem to benefit from these religious experiences or these other types of experiences. The last thing that I'll say, which I think speaks to this issue is from some other research I actually also conducted with my good friend and Enzo Nuccio was looking at recidivism of ex combatants. So when do ex combatants go back to crime or conflict? And we did a statistical analysis of ex combatants in Colombia. One of the things that we found that really stood out to me, it was the importance of family, and the importance of family ties and anchoring. And as Pedro said, you know, a lot of times families, maybe the cause of the problem, conflicts around the world are also known to drive families apart when one combatant is part of one side, or one family member is part of one combatant group, another family member is part of another combatant group.  That's very helpful. Thanks. The director of the Merchant Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, one of the co-hosts today, organizing this seminar with US Institute of Peace. Dorothy, you have some recommendations to offer and some insight based on your work. So I'll turn to you to give those. Just a reminder to the audience, you can still put in some questions if you have any, and please fill out the survey. One more time. Thanks. Hello, everybody. It would be very arrogant for me in this country in this company to make recommendations. But I have pulled together a couple of thoughts about the themes here. Let me just mention first the survey that has been mentioned to you a couple of times, which I guess is on the USIP registration page where you signed up. The point of that is that the ongoing project wants to gather data on what all of you are doing to really build up a map of initiatives to understand, you know, to build up this menu of options in part that Oliver has been talking about. So if you have participated, if you have observed, if you have facilitated, please share your experience and I gather that will be leading to future discussions. So I'm just a scholar and I want to begin by expressing huge respect for the long experience here of trial and error and persistence that has built the cumulative wisdom of the panelists here and of the audience engaged in this kind of work. And what you are doing as a kind of professional guild, I guess, is analogous to the work that local communities themselves do in shaping traditional culture and this is what I study my discipline is folklore. And I studied actually traditional festival in contemporary Western nation states, and this means that I am looking at long standing performances and practices that have cumulative authorship. So over often hundreds of years, thousands of people have been tinkering with these processes. So, you know, Lisa pointed to the relationship of tradition and innovation. This is simultaneous.  So sometimes it's more gradual sometimes it's more abrupt, but it is always happening and so their, you know, John Cocker I think pointed out the communities already have the skill of readjusting their practices to circumstances. And so this can lend itself to the crisis situation, as long as these foundations of social interaction, you know, basic safety are there. And so I wanted to highlight just some underlying themes in the discussion and connect them to some of what happens in the traditional rituals that are already going on in these communities, in ways that I hope might give a kind of practical framework to those of you who are thinking about how to generate a new observance. And so the first point is that aesthetics really matter they are not just decoration. I think, you know, in a very Western distinction about form before content form actually is content. And in your conversations, I think it's often helpful to have how come before what. So, John, and all of you have spoken eloquently on letting the community lead and design that you really have to have participatory agency to create ownership that will bring about an effective result. And I just wanted to highlight that when John and Pedro are talking about how these decisions get made. They are not making the kind of characteristic, they're not taking the characteristic modern approach of saying what should the rituals say, what's the message that should come out of it. They're saying what should it do really what should it look like what should happen. And this is I think a more productive approach that's going to bring up existing repertoires, existing social forms of coexistence greeting and eating. And celebrating that offer more possibilities of consensus and are more important to calming down violence. So Oliver mentioned, you know, the community praying together. Now it might be that some people believe in the efficacy of this and some people don't, but doesn't matter. They have already done something in getting everybody kneeling on the ground. And what Pascal would tell us something has already happened, a cooperation has already happened. And that in itself can lead to the better harvest that John mentioned, you know, the cooperation in even making the ritual happen is a little success of its own. That's one point, the forms focus on the forms, then aesthetic as one of my professors always used to say, aesthetic is the opposite of an aesthetic. It's not about looking pretty, it's about the organization of feeling as experienced by the body, less than by the rational faculties as the emphasis of Lisa's work has been to say. And of course it's working on the individual body ritual very often leaves tattoos or burn marks, or, you know, you are eating foods and taking things in there is incorporation of the ritual into the individual. But the body politic is also being manipulated here. When you are choreographing bodies in high and low spaces in center and periphery in approach and avoidance in incorporation and exclusion, you are reshaping the social order in a way that everybody can see and feel or deal. There is the middle of what Lisa called the transformational arc on the picture I'm showing you here is a festival from Catalonia. Sorry, a small town in Catalonia in the Spanish Pyrenees. The festival has been around since the 17th century. But in the late 1970s during the Spanish transition to democracy, it became a vehicle of community reconciliation. After first of all, the Spanish Civil War, which was back in 1939, but had not been resolved in any fashion and had been an intimate community level, violent conflict, followed by 40 years of dictatorship, with a whole lot of intimate betrayal going on, and a whole lot of public silence. So this festival became a way of processing and became a way of processing when the official political culture decided we can't afford to talk about this yet. So it was happening in people's bodies. The trauma was being addressed at the intimate site of the violence, both involuntarily in the sexual revolution in drug taking in popular culture in popular music, but in these traditional ritual forms, it was explicitly put to a community purpose. And so what middle class young people felt that they needed was to, and this was not a conscious intentional thing, it was a huge unplanned transformation to this festival. Sorry. These are devils. They've got firecrackers on their heads and their tails. They dance until everything blows up. There used to be 16 of them and they were the town drunks and coal miners that the city had to pay to get them to do it. But in the 1970s, middle class young men and women wanted to do this, and the number of devils went up to more than this little square could actually hold. Why? At the time, it was cool, it was risky, it was a way of being a devil and not having to be a good Catholic angel. But 20 years later, people said to me, well, this is the purifying fire. You know, we were ashamed. We were complicit in the regime. We were cowardly. We, you know, we had lost the war. All of this was a playing through our cowardice, our shame, our disgrace. And we purged the fire. They had a good Catholic metaphor for it, whether they were Catholic or not. They also said we'd never been in a crowd before. And they, this is the Franco regime, a very rigid dictatorship. So this in part was a rehearsal for the political street demonstrations for democracy that would happen later. But at a level they couldn't quite articulate. Middle class identity, especially under a dictatorship is very much about protecting your boundaries, gender boundaries, class boundaries, ethnic boundaries, watching about looking at how other people are looking at you and what they're saying about you, dissolving those boundaries and melting into other people in this sweaty, filthy mass where everybody is drunk. This was a terrifying thing. It was also an exhilarating thing. And it created a different under a different experience of collectivity that was not based around positional difference. So all traditional rights of passage typically contain an ordeal, and they can be quite violent. They involve fear in undergoing it. Pedro talked about a huge long process, a long process of spiritual diagnosis and individual task of repair taking years. So serious work getting done. I think Oliver mentioned some other more communal, easier things like participating in a public work project, Reparatory Labor. All of these challenges, which may involve humiliation and cleansing, which may involve productive work. They are effortful and there's pride in getting through this thing that's frightening and difficult and shows persistence. So they both make everybody remember and mutually acknowledge the crime, but they are also an effort that, as John said, restores your dignity that you have been willing to undergo this ordeal shows your commitment to going forward. Then the organization of attention. What ritual does is to guide you here, the fire around that focal fire. As, as, as John said, people can confess these dreadful crimes with the ancestors with the fire with this context of huge importance and huge aesthetic power. These things can take sort of a proportionate space that can't happen in the everyday world. Part of this is what we focus on. Part of it's what we don't focus on. You can do things in rhythm that you can't do in words. So some things are on the record. Some things we want to capture with the camera. Some things should happen under the radar on the lower frequencies, as Ralph Allison said. So this is kind of the virtuous equivalent of gas lighting that you're quietly changing the background until people, you know, suddenly things have changed.  The way that oppressed people speak their minds in public for most of history is to say, oh, this is just tradition. This is only folklore. This is just nonsense. This is how stuff can get said by being vague by being metaphorical by not by having deniability. Modeling reality. Ritual has an intellectual development dimension. It's a way of modeling reality so that we can look at it collectively. And, you know, with this event, the festival that I looked at, if there's a message attached to this larger event, which is a whole bunch of symbolic combats where nobody wins and they all live to fight another year. It's a kind of meta message you find in a lot of Western European festival. We're never going to love each other, but nobody's going away and nobody is big enough to get rid of everybody else. We are stuck together. Traditional festival often plays with the negative.   And he said, maybe this is a portrait of life as we most deeply do not want it. So I think to be effective, perhaps ritual needs to acknowledge the horror as well as find a pathway out of it. But in a way here, that's probably metaphorical. That's deniable. That's bearable. I think there comes a moment where you want to be explicit about the tacit knowledge that communities share. But you might need to dance it out for several years first. This is an empirical question. Then just sorry, a few more things. Transformative process. I know that in this group's discussion, they've questioned, you know, is ritual the term we want, is ceremony the term. All language is loaded with baggage. And so what you call this thing happening really is something you have to sort out locally. But for analytical purposes, I just want to point to two ends of a kind of continuum that you might want to think about when you're figuring out what you need given the timing, given the circumstances. So play. There might be a moment when your collectivity is not ready for ritual. It's too early. The communal space is not safe yet. And maybe you need to take a few people away to get their heads out of that situation altogether. And Lisa, I believe, wrote about a Cypriot youth camp where young people from the two sides were taken off to a totally different space doing stuff that had nothing to do with anything, just playing sports. This is the kind of thing you might want for the people who are, for different people, maybe for the people who are leaders who have to kind of train their imagination to come up with some new possibilities. Maybe for the young who are not fully formed in cases where they haven't been involved in combat and are maybe freer to come up with new frameworks. Maybe for people who are really stuck as a kind of therapy to just let them put their heads in a game that has rules that has nothing to do with anything. But what play can do in general is to relativize the way we organize the world is not the only way of organizing the world. So play is a voluntary space. I go into it. I kind of decide to do it. I also decide my strategy in the game. I get, whoops, creative. Oh, I'm sorry. Play is this space that is plural and free and gets us out of things. But by the same token, it doesn't get you safely back in to the everyday. It doesn't have immediate effects at home. So ritual is what you might be ready for. And here it's a way of remodeling, whoops, remodeling what is already there. So ritual is obligatory. You really have to do it. It's conditioned of being a member of something bigger than you are. Ritual is public. As John said, it's before everybody who is involved and knows it is collective. Everybody is there, including your enemies. You all have to show up to confirm your membership in the group to acknowledge your relationship to the crisis. It stylizes the everyday. It highlights some aspects of it, even the stylized processes that Oliver talked about. These point to everyday rituals of greeting people, of eating together of sharing space. So you want to study what the existing ritual repertoire of the community is. The community will do this themselves, of course, and think about how this ritual fits into everything they're already doing. Because a rite of passage is about, as Lisa emphasized, reshaping the everyday identity so that you return with a new way of engaging. And typically you are marked with a new status. You put on a new costume. The community has now a defined way of treating you as a member of a new class. Pedro talked about the secret rituals in the indigenous communities, bringing you to an insider admission that restores a kind of identity that gives you a way of reintegration. So as all of you emphasized, what comes after the ritual is critical. And here you want to think then, what are the following up connections going to be that are going to give you, that are going to give the combatant this second chance under observation, as Oliver called it. And these really are your indicators of success. It's, I think, requires, in the best case, a grad, you know, an observation over time that might show you who's coming to the bar to watch the football match. Who is engaged in Compadrasco? Who is visiting the elders for spiritual consultation? Who is able to get married? You would expect that this is going to be a gradual and iterative thing. But if you want to see civil society, the way to see it is to look at these everyday rituals, these everyday practices in which people are actually mutually engaged. So sorry for talking so long, but thanks to all of you for giving us such stunning examples of this thinking. Thank you so much, Dorothy. So there's a whole long history of people studying rituals, symbolic actions, both formal and informal. So we've talked today about community-based rituals, but there's been, you know, sort of effort at the United Nations to think about what are the different kinds of conversations people have when they're smoking cigarettes in the courtyard right outside the mediation room, or what happens when people are eating dinner together? And why do the Norwegians, with their mediation efforts, often take people out to mountain chalets where they go walking in the woods together? What happens with our bodies and our senses can impact our rational brain, and sometimes these conflict situations are so complex, so full of ambiguity, and so difficult to think through in a very logical, linear way that more embodied symbolic actions can jog us out of that sort of impasse. Let me turn it back to the three panelists here for the last few minutes. Are there any responses to Dorothy's frameworks, to any of the questions that have come in today? Do you have any final comments? I mean, I'll just jump in and say I thought Dorothy's comments were fascinating, and as someone who's a big fan of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey and all those kinds of rites of passage, I thought it was great. And I'll just say, you know, to conclude from my part, you know, I thought it was great to be part of this ritual that we had together today, as you may all be accustomed to USIP has rituals that are 1.5 hours long and have group discussions as a panel. And so it was great to be a part of it. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Rossi. That was very, very interesting. I certainly got a whole bunch of new ideas for future research. Thank you so much. John. You're on mute. Sorry. Thank you. I just want to say, and that was really fascinating. And I've got so much to learn from that. You know, for us, we are in a learning stage. We believe by accompanying communities, you know, you learn from them, you know, and you are able to share your learning with the outside world so that we don't make the mistakes we've been making in the past. You know, we are in, we tend to think for people, we tend to plan for people, you know, we tend to go in with our preconceived idea. And we know in terms of finding solutions. So, you know, we believe, you know, engaging communities, you know, consulting with stakeholders, consulting with community members, you will really find out that yes, they have what it takes to move to the next level. And all what we can do is sometimes just to create a space, facilitate the invite, and maybe build on the confidence, the trust, so people know it's a sacred space that they can speak freely. And that is really important for people to unleash their potential, you know, for people to say what they want to say, you know, speak frankly. And for us, you say, get it off your chest and then move on as a community. I really want to thank you very much for the invite and I learned a lot from this conversation. Thank you, Pedro. Thank you, Oliver. Thank you to the whole team. Yeah, it's good to be part of this. Thank you. Thank you, John. And thanks to everyone. Dorothy, do you have any final comments before we close down? I have, I think, said enough, but I really look forward to learning more about this field of practice and to thinking about this interaction between what communities are kind of figuring out on their own and what what can be facilitated. I think it's enormously important and I'm privileged to have listened to it. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much, everyone. A final reminder on the survey. We hope this is the beginning of a conversation at the end of one. And that survey will help us think about the next event, perhaps where we hear about more different types of local ritual symbolic actions that can help transform communities and individuals from their identities and the midst of conflict to what we need to achieve in a post conflict peaceful place where there's social cohesion. Thanks so much, everyone.


Hey guys, Broogly here and something is weird right now with my bathroom. I'm not sure what's happening, but I'm gonna show you. But here's the bathroom by itself. There's nothing here, it's me. But every time I close the door, just watch. Then I open the back up again. Dude, see what I'm saying? Like, what is actually happening right now? Okay, there's nothing there right now, obviously.  That's actually crazy. Like, I was doing it. Race of you in the backrooms? Yeah. Oh, cool.


There are activities lined up for Pakistani ship PNS Alamgarh's visit to Lagos. The commanding officer, PNS Alamgarh, alongside mission commander, overseas and defence commander, paid a courtesy call on the flag officer commanding Western Neville Command, the proceed to the Nigerian Navy reference hospital or jaw for a medical rhapsody. This is to show support to Africa Navy, especially Nigeria, as a giant of Africa. Plus TV Africa's defence correspondent, Destiny Momo, has more. It was a good sight beholding the Pakistani Navy dressed same as our Nigerian Navy. From their conversation, you could tell their synergy in formidable partnership. The flag officer commanding was represented by Ria Admiral Habila Zakaria. He informed that the command finds it a privilege, hosting the Pakistani Navy and having their professional medical team of six. He speaks on the improvement of Nigerian naval officers who studied in Pakistan. As part of their visit, they will be having what is called a medical camp or medical rhapsody where they will treat people within our own environment for some basic medical illnesses. And the understanding is that they have some specialist doctors who we, our people, can avail themselves of this specialty from these doctors. And by and large, we are willing to, as we have accepted them, we want to take them to the Navy town where this medical camp is going to be held. In the same vein, Commander Azamar Mood, Mission Commander, overseas deployment around Africa, commanded the Nigerian Navy. He was excited about giving Nigerian Navy catchment in Lagos the best of their medical team as part of their mission as they go across Africa. From the people of Pakistan and the government of Pakistan, we value our relation with Nigeria. We are looking for more cooperation in the future. And in this mission, we are going to have different meetings like the one which we have just had over here in which we are going to talk of how we can improve our relation with our brothers over here, how we can, in this part also, we are going to have a medical camp for two days over here in which we have a very specialist team of doctors available with us and they are going to have free medicines as well for the local populace. It is just a very token of love and it shows our intentions and the good wishes from the people of Pakistan to the Nigeria. This visit can be described as timely. The Pakistani ship P&S visit to Lagos will be from 14th to 17th December 2021. Destiny Momo for Plus TV Africa.