Good morning, everyone. My name is Clut Roush. I'm the Associate Vice President for Global Practice and Innovation here at the United States Institute of Peace. And it is a pleasure to welcome you to our building and also on behalf of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Forum, this event here today is being organized under the auspices of the forum. And I'd like to also welcome and thank the members who have been in partnership with USIP and together the consortium since 1999 has been holding events to bring together peace builders, conflict resolution and prevention specialists to talk about key issues, challenges, lessons, and innovations around the issues of conflict resolution and prevention. And the partners include Search for Common Ground, as well as Georgetown University, and Partners Global, Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, and also the Lines for Peace Buildings. So it's a pleasure to have been working with them for so many years on important topics related to our field. Today's discussion is titled Building Inclusive, Stronger Peace Processes, Here's How. And the focus will be on what it takes, what are the challenges, what are the key takeaways that the panelists can give to us when we're thinking about what might be in a toolkit on how effectively to build inclusive peace processes. Our speakers for this forum are veterans of many different conflict areas and they have worked across continents and they will bring their wisdom with us today. And their work has included supporting national dialogues, fostering reconciliation between groups and building public confidence in peace processes. We're looking forward to a very vibrant discussion and we're going to unpack the important insights and lessons learned from our panelists today. And also you're a very important component of this. The format will go as follows. Each of our panelists will make introductory remarks to kind of ground each of us in the context of the country and peace processes or reconciliation process or national dialogue processes they've worked on so we'll understand the context. And then they're going to pull out two to three really key takeaways that from their work they would contribute to a toolkit or lessons that they would suggest. Then what we're going to do is I'm going to ask a series of questions and as you're listening to their input and their presentations you have note cards so please be part of the discussion. And if a question, a burning question that you've always had that you came here to get answered or one comes up in your mind when you're listening please write that down on your note card. And this event is being webcast and if you're on Twitter you can post your question and we will feed that into the Q and A at the end of the session also. And remember it's hashtag CPRF standing for Conflict Prevention Resolution Forum at USIP. So with that I would like to introduce our panelists. We have Olash Dolga Aral who is a professional lecturer at the School of International Service at American University. Next to him, Elizabeth Murray, Senior Program Officer for Middle East and Africa here at USIP. Michael Shippler, Regional Director, Asia and he's with Search for Common Ground and then via Skype thanks to technology. We have Mari Fitzduff who's Director, Master of Arts Program in Coexistence and Conflict at Brandeis University as well as we have Jonathan Cohen joining us and he's Executive Director for Conciliation Resources. You can read more about each of them on the bio sheet and now I would like to turn it over to Olash who is going to kick us off and he's going to be talking about Turkey. Yep. So welcome everyone. Thanks Colet and the whole USIP team for having us over here. I first like to give you guys a quick overview about the Kurdish conflict in Turkey and I'm gonna then talk for a couple of minutes about the peace process itself and how it was designed and the process and the actors and maybe a couple of takeaways that I think could be used as part of a toolkit really to prevent conflicts and even transform them. So before further ado, the conflict in Turkey now costs around 45,000 lives. It's been going on now almost 40 years and over the course of these four decades we had three different initiatives that actually tried to bring some sort of a settlement to this rather, I would say, systemic and at the same time quite identity-based conflict. And I took couple notes. It's kind of painful for me actually to go over the areas where this went wrong because many of the stakeholders did actually have a responsibility to make this work but if the willingness is not there I don't think that peace processes succeed. So the current government in Turkey, the Erdogan government back in 2007 when they really start feeling themselves secure in the way they hold political power in their hands they thought it was actually the right moment to start what they at the time called a Kurdish opening. So they started recognizing a set of culture rights for the Kurdish minority, started introducing certain legislation that would allow for, let's say, broadcasting in Kurdish language but they never recognized Kurdish as a mother tongue or as an official language in Turkey so they never did that. But along with that new perspective at the time many in Turkey thought this was actually a good time to start thinking whether it would be possible to put an end to this violence. So over the course of I would say eight years we had seen three different attempts to bring an end to the conflict in Turkey. The first period was between 2007 and 2009 where basically the goal was just disarmament and the idea is right if one of the and in most instances this really is the guerrilla groups decided to put their arms down then it inevitably would lead to a certain sense of normalization and it would lead to democratization. But I think first take away from that experience was the Turkish government allowed this kind of gesture of reconciliation to have a very public exposure so and the PKK used that to their own advantage and a couple I would say eight former guerrillas entered the Turkish border with their full armor gears on. Okay so and this was actually seen as a defeat in the Turkish public opinion and many constituencies under the AKP mostly nationalist they started demonstrating and then violence again re-rupted. So that's how the first opening ended. Then we had a brief period between 2009 and 2011 where it was later revealed that Turkish government and the PKK did whole talks in Oslo right about a possible draft agreement that would allow for some sort of settlement and would provide democratic rights to Turkish citizens of Kurdish origin. But again I think that the issue of exposure to public comes into play. The documents leaked and the conversations leaked somehow to the media and the government officials who had somehow taken part in these negotiations started denying and the process died before it kicked off. But parties didn't give up. So actually the most hopeful part was between 2013 and 2015. The imprisoned leader of the PKK Abdullah Öcalan decided to work and set up a secretariat in that particular island that came up with a 10 point draft resolution that would put an end to the conflict and Turkish government by then actually passed a new law that would allow for the official government representatives to have contacts with the terrorists and carry on these negotiations. But again what happened? The regional politics intervened and the developments in Syria basically put an end to what otherwise might have been actually a successful process because the Ankara government decided to move ahead against the Kurdish forces in northern Syria and that obviously angered the Kurds in Turkey and when you don't have a certain sense of trust between the parties during these processes, it fails. And that's what happened especially after the 2015 June elections where the AKP lost its majority in the parliament ever since then. We had lost more than 2000 people in Turkey as a result of violence. More than four cities were basically demolished to ground as a part of this new fight against terrorism strategy and there is now an ongoing, let's say polarization in Turkey that we hadn't seen for decades which is quite frightening really. So I could go deeper but I think we could do it in question and answer session but there are a couple of takeaways that I think are quite important. So across all peace processes, whether you look into Nepal, Columbia, Northern Ireland and wherever across all divided societies I think there's three important components that we need to underline. First obviously is the design. Design of the peace process should be made clear from the start, okay? And that means what is the objective? What are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to achieve what we call disarmament? Is that the end goal? Or are we really interested in the integration of former combatants into a newly democratically defined society? Without that agreement I don't see any design being successful. Second obviously is the process itself and I think that's where the inclusivity comes into play. Meaning and I interpret inclusivity more through exposure to public and I could talk more about it later but I think it's important for us to start thinking the question, A, should we take such peace arrangements to the public through referendums or not? B, if the answer is yes, when should we do it? Is there a good timing for it? Should we do it before we start the negotiations or should we do it at the end of it? And I think another obviously more important component is the actors. That's the third component of any peace process. And when I look into the actors category you see that you need to have all the key, I'm not saying all stakeholders but at least all the key stakeholders as part of the negotiation process and more importantly you need to make all the possible efforts to foster trust between the parties. If trust is not necessarily a part of the dynamic I don't see any process really succeeding so and that trust really is part of the whole paradigm whether and to what extent you allow other parties know about what's going on. And we could obviously talk more about it but I'll just leave it at that and I'm really curious about to hear from other experts and their own experiences in other conflicts. Thanks Salah. Okay, thanks so much Ulaj. I'd like to now turn to Mari and she will be discussing her experiences with the Northern Ireland peace process. So Mari. It's good to talk to you. I'm in Ireland at the moment so it's the afternoon here. Thank you for inviting me. I've just got four key points I want to talk about that I think were key to actually creating a successful peace process in Northern Ireland. The first thing and it's related to your focus on conflict prevention. In 1969 when the conflict broke out because there was significant inequalities in Northern Ireland. It could easily have been avoided by government measures that actually address those differences. And because the government which was British and Unionist Protestant were mainly suspicious of the requests for civil rights they actually refused to concede to those and that led us into what was almost a 30 year war. So everywhere I go there are these kinds of opportunities and I keep thinking of Assad when he came into power. There was such an opportunity for him to create a different kind of society but he didn't. So we'd have to develop institutions that actually address those inequalities. The other thing I want to say is in my experience all over the world it is little point in developing just relationships if you're also not prepared to develop structural issues and address them. People become very suspicious if they think you just want them to be friends and not to address existing inequalities. The second thing for us that was so important was the development of civil society. In the absence of politicians whom we basically paroled in 1974 and didn't bring back for about 15 years we developed an enormously rich civil society. Not only did they become dedicated to actually looking at processes of reconciliation but they also had the added requirement and as one of them as the major funder in Northern Ireland we required them not just to have conversations just among themselves but also to include the political parties and the politicians. I'm conscious that some countries I go to there's an understandable reluctance to involve the politicians and try to do people-to-people talks but the reality is that people-to-people talks by themselves will rarely develop into the kind of conversations that you need in terms of developing an actual peace process. And certainly we always encourage our people who are looking at these kinds of processes whether it's in Israel or the Cameroon or wherever that they include in those kinds of conversations where possible politicians, paramilitary leaders, leaders, et cetera, et cetera. So I think an active civil society I think by the time I left there were 1200 groups in Northern Ireland who were actively involving issues of structure and issues of politics. The third point that I think was critical for us was because we had so many groups working with civil society. We actually developed three new political parties. Two of these were on the Protestant Union side and they were working class politics which had developed in conjunction with Sinn Fein, IRA, Republican politics. Both of these groups were working significantly at community level and they began to develop processes whereby they could address some of the needs of the community in tandem. These could have been unemployment, they could have been women's issues, they could have been educational issues, they could have been training issues. But because they actually had connected on issues that brought them together it meant that the development of two new working class Protestant communities through our community development meant that we had an added and different voice to the voice of the more traditional Unionists who by and large were actually alienated from many in the Catholic community. Added to that of course was the fact that the paramilitary group and the IRA began to develop its own community politics through its political party, Sinn Fein. And it meant that before we went into the peace process we actually then had these extra Unionist loyalists working through their political party. And the other addition was the addition of a political women's group. I was very involved in the development of that and I can remember how exciting it was because they basically decided from the beginning not to be a position party but to be a process party. In other words they dedicated themselves to addressing women's issues and other issues such as policing but in a bipartisan manner. And it meant that they had connections right through the Northern Ireland society, connections every class, every creed. And they became a hugely influential process of a mediation group, particularly with all the political parties. I remember going to visit them when we had begun to put together a peace process and I could see them walking around talking with many of the different groups and walking in a way that no other could have done because they were bipartisan, they were inclusive both in terms of class and creed. The fourth thing that was politically important for us was the mediation process that was developed. A lot of it in conjunction with the NGO and civil society. And we've done a lot of research on this that shows how important they were. And it has actually been estimated that 60% of the success of the political process in Northern Ireland was brought about by the capacity of the civil society. This was because by and large they could go where political parties could not go. We're a very small place, those of you who've been in Northern Ireland know you can drive from end to end in about three hours. But because it was such a tight society, it meant that politicians often didn't have the opportunity to connect with each other on an informal basis. So what civil society did was they often provided opportunities that were fairly unthreatening, dealing with social issues to bring the political parties and the paramilitary parties together. Many of them were also involved in shuttle mediation in trying to assess on which issues that parties could achieve an agreement. And I can remember the number at one stage, the number of processes that were high heading out through Northern Ireland going between and within the parties, actually dealing with many of the issues that were sent onto the Belfast Agreement. The fourth thing, when it came to the issue of the agreement itself, we had put in place a really interesting process two years before the political parties sat down, before the political parties called a ceasefire. And that was called the Opsal process. This Opsal process was initiated by what we called the great and the good from both sides of the community, who were just about acceptable to all sides of the conflict. They actually did a year-long process of listening through our church halls, through our community halls, at an individual level, through our universities, through our schools, at what people wanted if there was to be an agreement. I have to tell you that political parties were very suspicious of this, including Sinn Fein, because they said to us, that's our job, not yours. We promptly pointed out that they had not been doing their job, and this was carried out by civil society. There's a two-inch thick report from that. And if you look at it, you will see that many of the suggestions that were made in that were actually carried through the Belfast Agreement. It made it much easier to get an agreement on the Belfast Agreement, because many of the issues that people had commented on wanting were actually included in that agreement, and people could see how much their voices had been represented in that, as well as the political voices. The final point was the political process itself went on, as you know, many of you for months and months. I'll sometimes say we start people into an agreement because we had given us a final date of the agreement on Good Friday, which was a couple of days before Easter in terms of the Christian vocabulary. By Good Friday, an agreement had not been reached. We stopped all food and all drink, going into the parties, and they worked extremely hard over the next day and night, to have this. And also, we did also another thing that was very, I think, that was very worthwhile. Things that were so difficult to get an agreement, there were two of them. One was policing, and one was on decommissioning. We promptly put both of those into separate commissions to be dealt with after the agreement, and people felt comfortable enough that enough had been achieved that they actually could sign that agreement. So just to repeat, structures are important. You can't deal with just relationships without addressing issues of inequality and inclusion. The second one is, if you're building up civil society, make sure that they don't just include civil society, but they include political leaders and military leaders. That can be done in many different ways. We had many of the children of political leaders on many of our programs. We had many of the political leaders in talking to us, and it really has to be inclusive of those who have power. You cannot deliver those with power are not included. The third one was, civil society can do a lot of the different work that political parties and military parties can't do themselves. They can do it confidentially and quietly. The fourth thing is then, develop if you can new politics, because the old politics for us had not delivered in 50 years. We had to develop new working-class politics, and we had to develop women's politics. And the fourth thing, apart from making sure you put deadlines on to people in peace processes, by the way, that's actually quite important. Many peace processes are prolonged because of the fact that we give the daily allowances for people to attend peace processes, and often you will find many people have said to me that these actually, in poor countries particularly, are often the only allowances they get, so why should they hurry to create a peace agreement? That's just an extra piece of advice. But things that are too difficult, make sure you put them aside to be dealt with in trusted commissions later on, such as decommissioning, such as policing. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mari, for those very clear points. And a lot of these, we will pick up again, and through the question and answer, we're gonna expand upon them. So right now for those who just joined, each of the panelists are making general comments to ground us in their country, and the area that they're focusing on today, they're bringing out the two, three, four key takeaways that they want us to know, and then through the question and answer period, we will delve further into those. So now we're going to turn to Jonathan, who is also on Skype, and he's gonna talk about the Philippines. Thanks very much, and I hope you can all hear loudly and clearly. As I said, I want to speak a bit about the Philippines, and I think it's a very interesting example, because we've recently seen the Philippines in the international media around the so-called war on drugs, and a president who's perceived as condoning this, and that clearly reflects a deep-seated challenge in regard to human rights. An issue that's actually been the Philippines since the fall of the Marcos regime in 86, and of course, prior to that. But I want to talk about the protracted conflicts in the Philippines, and in particular, the conflict between the government and the Bansamora people in Mindanao, and reflect on the experience we've had of supporting inclusion in the peace process there. But I should note that there are two important conflicts in peace processes, one around what's in Mindanao with the Morro Islamic Liberation Front, the MLF, and the second with the communist insurgency. And both of these have continued for some four decades. But the important, and I think it's quite paradoxical that at the moment, I'll talk about the MLF process, but in regard to the communist insurgency, it's paradoxical that at the moment, it's the most progressive period for talks in that process in 40 years, a process that is all about social justice, and yet that progression is happening under a president who's perceived as allowing impunity for extrajudicial killing. So one needs to hold on to paradoxes when you're thinking about peace processes. In regard to the MLF process, we sometimes forget how severe it was. In the 1970s in particular, there was intense violence. And overall, over this multi-year period, some 120,000 people were killed in the conflict in Mindanao. And there have been different phases of mediation, but there was one agreement signed with one party in the Morro National Liberation Front in 1996. But in 2014, an agreement was signed with the Morro Islamic Liberation Front. And this has been a 17-year negotiation process that has seen a very creative and hybrid mediation architecture with a process for verifying ceasefires, with a process supporting the negotiations, and another process accompanying it to look at the implementation of agreements. And the participation of Filipinos became a critical dimension of this. And I think reflects on, gives us food for thought to reflect on in regard to inclusion. And it was a critical component of the signing of two agreements, the Framework Agreement on the Bank Samora in 2012 and the Comprehensive Agreement in 2014. And the central dimension of the Comprehensive Agreement was the establishment of a new self-governing entity called the Bank Samora, which had to be ratified through Parliament, through the Congress. And that's where the critical moment comes because two years later, it hasn't yet been ratified. But there's been an extraordinary process of participation pushing this forward. And a lot of that came through as a result of the relentless efforts of peace builders, many from civil society, and doing just what Mary was saying, working in dialogue initiatives, creating peace zones, creating opportunities for engagement with political actors. And consideration resources has been involved for a number of years in this. And we were fortunate enough to be invited to be part of something called the International Contact Group, which was a very innovative mechanism of four states, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Japan, the United Kingdom, and foreign NGOs, ourselves, Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Asia Foundation, and the Mohammedia. And this was a very innovative process to actors, observers, in supporting both the peace panels of the two parties, the government and the Amirah, and in particular, the Malaysian government-appointed facilitator of the talks. And alongside our involvement in that ICG, we initiated a process to support women's meaningful participation in the peace process. And from 2013 through until 2016, we worked with four NGOs in Mindanao to support a process to engage with their community. And in particular, the part of the architecture was to establish a Bang Samora Transition Commission. And the NGOs we worked with identified this commission as a critical institution where they needed to exert influence in order to shape the legislation that would go to Congress and that would determine the future shape of the Bang Samora political entity. And so in our work, we supported these four NGOs to lobby, to raise awareness, to train communities, to influence the process. And I want to draw out three summary key lessons that we found from this process. The first one was the critical issue of understanding and responding to the diversity of perspectives, needs and expectations amongst the women of Mindanao. All too often, whether you're working with the focus on women as a social and political entity or with another social political group, there's a tendency to homogenize them and not to recognize the diversity. And I think this diversity is a critical component of inclusion to recognize what the potential of diversity is. And it was especially relevant in a challenging context such as Mindanao where custom and religion in many ways clash with the purpose of women's empowerment. So working with women's groups that wanted to generate empowerment, that wanted to create an inclusive process but were very aware of the cultural issues they were up against. Secondly, in order to make the diversity functional, we were very conscious of the combination of partners that should come together. So this is a second part of the diversity issue. I'll come on to the other two points in a moment. And so the partner organizations we worked with, two of them were Muslim, one of them was an Indigenous persons organization and one was a predominantly Christian network. Now, of course, you want in many ways an ideal situation is to find institutions that could be like the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition that Mary reflected on, which played a bipartisan role bringing people together. Sometimes it's possible to create these fusion-like organizations. Sometimes you need to work with the organizations that come out of the community and that represent that community but then come together in a partnership with others from other communities. And I think what was critical in this was that these women created spaces in which the multiple identities and affiliations of women in the banks or more could come out. So the first issue is around understanding and responding to diversity. The second one is around working in partnership with different yet complementary people and organizations. And I think this derives from the notion that no one has all the answers as to what makes change happen in a conflict region. And so if you can construct creative partnerships that weave together the aspirations of different sections of the community, you're going to be more likely to come up with answers that will address root causes. And you're going to, through doing this, create relationships that enable people to push the boundaries of their comfort zones. And I think that's a critical issue for peace builders. You really need to be able to push boundaries of comfort zones. And then perhaps three other critical peace-building characteristics that we observed in the work of our partners that I think we should encourage wherever we were was the spirit of inquiry that they brought to what they were doing. Secondly, the humility with which they worked. And thirdly, the spirit of generosity that they offered to those who had views that diverged from their own. The third issue I want to speak about is around engaging with power holders, another point that Mary made. And the importance of engaging with them at all levels in order to change attitudes and behavior. Now in the work that we undertook in the Philippines, we had an assumption that the success of advocacy in influencing the implementation of the comprehensive agreement depended on partners being able to consult with a wide number of women in the conflict-affected areas, ensuring that the diversity of the women's perspectives were taken into consideration, and then that they would create advocacy messages and engage in advocacy processes that would enable them to identify the right people to influence and to change. And I think what we learned was this was all correct, but it was insufficient. That you can identify the right people, you can identify the right messages, but you won't necessarily generate the change that you want to see happen. And in the case of the comprehensive agreement and the passing of the legislation that was called the Bangsam or a Basic Law, as I said, that law wasn't passed, partly because you had a time-bound situation whereby the presidential term came to an end in 2016 and the legislation wasn't passed by that point because there was significant opposition in Congress. And the opposition in Congress in many ways was, it was diverse and that creates a problem because we saw that if you don't engage with those people who aren't primarily involved in the talks early enough, they will become a source of opposition later on in the process. And I think this tendency to engage with like-minded organizations, with like-minded policymakers, and not necessarily reach out to the different audiences is something that can really stifle the peace process. But also I suppose one has to recognize that engagement is a lot easier said than done and it requires people to understand the power dynamics in a situation and in particular to feel confident to assert your own authority. And this is a very challenging issue if you're working to promote women's participation in societies where the culture has not been one of empowerment of women. And so I think whilst we've reached the situation that an extraordinary process of consultation took place with more than 3,000 women reached through the consultations that were facilitated by our project partners and a tremendous sense of empowerment which has seen women playing very dynamic roles at senior organizations, gain invisibility, gain incompetence, gain invoice. And in a context where I should add that the Philippines perhaps more than most peace processes is one where women have played a critical role and where the 1325, the UN Scooter Cancer Resolution has been taken more seriously than perhaps in any other peace process. It has still confronted a society that is not entirely ready for that transformation. And perhaps the critical lesson is therefore that this is a long-term endeavor that demands patience and persistence and that we'll not see change happen at the rate you necessarily want to see it happen but that doesn't mean that fundamental change isn't happening. And even now under President Duterte who as I started off by saying is perceived as someone who is permitting a context of impunity in the Philippines at the same time he is actually being engaged with by many political actors including the women who we've worked with and there is some very serious conversation about new legislation being passed through Congress and even about the fundamental issue of changing the constitution in the Philippines to entrench long-term change. So I think I'll end on this point that one needs to get beyond some of the most simplistic headlines that sometimes dominate our perception of a conflict context and recognize that there are multiple layers beneath that and that there are multiple paths that need to be pursued in the efforts to attain peace. Thanks so much Jonathan for your points and discussion around the Philippines experience. We're now gonna turn to Elizabeth Murray who is going to talk about the Sudan experiences. Thanks Khaled and thanks to all of you who have joined today. I know that I speak on behalf of all the panelists when I say that we're really looking forward to your questions and insights. Here at USIP I work on our Sub-Saharan Africa team and on our research program on national dialogues. So very briefly today I'm going to speak about some insights on public participation in national dialogues and briefly discuss the recent Sudan national dialogue as an example. As we begun our work on national dialogues here at USIP a few years ago our first task was to define what a national dialogue is and there are many, many, many different definitions but for the purposes of our research we decided that we would look at national dialogues that met three criteria. Dialogues that operate outside of the permanent institutions of government. In other words a permanent commission is not for our purposes a national dialogue. We look at dialogues, the second criteria we're looking at dialogues that are multi-issue dialogues that are really trying to get at the multiple root causes of conflict or root causes of unrest or possible causes of conflict not necessarily a single-issue dialogue such as the Bolivian national dialogue on water policy for example. The third criteria for national dialogues that we include in our research is that the dialogue has the backing of a credible coalition of stakeholders such that its resulting recommendations have a realistic chance of being implemented. National dialogues, we have studied a variety of them and they can have a variety of relationships to peace processes. They can happen before, during, or after a peace process. They can happen as a reconciliation and post-conflict healing exercise and they can happen in circumstances where conflict isn't an immediate risk as sort of a national visioning exercise or as a political deadlock breaking mechanism. So this is a very broad set of processes. Our research is looking at the recent national dialogues in Tunisia, Yemen, Lebanon, Kenya, Senegal and the Central African Republic and these range from dialogues that took five days to dialogues that took many months from 50 participants to 800 participants. So we're seeking to explain all the different forms that these processes can take. As we begun this research, we wrote a short publication that would precede our case study publication which is coming out this year. It's on your way out. I encourage you to take a copy. We set out several elements that we thought were important for a national dialogue to be successful and one of those is public participation and transparency of a national dialogue. Public participation can happen just as it can in a peace process at many stages of a national dialogue in the preparatory phase. When the conveners of the national dialogue are seeking to define the process and the agenda, there are opportunities for public participation for the public to identify the issues that they think should be addressed or the way in which the dialogue can be structured. Naturally public participation can happen during a dialogue in the deliberations itself with the public appearing in person or being consulted outside of the dialogue to give their insights. Public participation can happen during the final negotiations as the agreement is being worked out. A draft agreement can be taken back to the public for their response and their feedback before a final voting exercise. And importantly, I think something that's often overlooked is that there are many opportunities for the public to participate in the implementation of national dialogues which we see is often very much lacking. Many national dialogues come to fruition without a concrete plan for how they will be implemented and resultingly there can be a lot of time and effort and political capital that is spent on these without concrete results. So designing opportunities for the public to participate in the implementation is another important opportunity. Not only can public participation happen at different stages in a national dialogue process, it can take different forms. So we've seen in recent national dialogue processes that in some of them there's an opportunity for members of the public to arrive at the hall and give three minute testimonies on issues that are of concern to them. In other national dialogues, delegates may be sent out to their constituent groups whether they're identity based or regional to brief them on what's happening in the dialogue and seek their inputs. And more and more I think we're seeing how new media or traditional media can offer ways for the public, particularly in outlying areas to send their inputs in. I think of public participation as ways for the public to feed in their views. And the other half of the virtuous circle is transparency, efforts around a national dialogue, regular media briefings, open sessions that the public can join and observe such that the public knows what's happening and can feed their views in. Sudan's recent national dialogue did not show all of these characteristics of public participation and transparency. We also talk about when we discuss national dialogues in our research we talk about public participation, those moments that the public can arrive and participate and we also talk about inclusion and we deal with those as somewhat different but related concepts. So not only do you want the general public to be able to contribute but you want to make sure that all of the different stakeholder groups that are affected by conflict conditions in a country that they have a seat at the table. Sudan's national dialogue didn't quite meet standards that we would expect for public participation or for inclusion. Many of you know it was initiated by President Omar al-Bashir in October, 2014 and deliberations then ran for about 12 months from October, 2015 to October, 2016. And at a first glance with 700 participants that looks like an inclusive and participatory process but when you dig a bit deeper there were many troubling elements, the dialogue was initiated by the government. One of our other points in our early research on national dialogues is that it is rare that the sitting government is well positioned to initiate a national dialogue. It is more optimal that a convener be viewed as neutral and not have a stake in the sitting government. And this posed problems in Sudan. From the outset many people debated whether President Omar al-Bashir could convene a national dialogue that was reflective of Sudan's diversity and whether he even had the intent to do so. Many of the country's opposition groups, most of the main opposition groups actually boycotted a dialogue, this was because the Sudanese government didn't meet what were set out as enabling conditions including the release of political prisoners. And additionally the public participation opportunities were quite flawed. There was a social dialogue that accompanied the national dialogue and the conveners of the social dialogue went out to the seven districts of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and consulted with the public and they visited with 20 special interest groups and consulted with them. But ultimately this material which was significant was only annexed to the results of the national dialogue. It was just a couple pieces of paper that were stapled to the end. So that's an example where you gathered a bunch of data but it was not meaningfully incorporated into the process. In addition Khartoum is a big metropolis but it's only one part of a large and complicated country, it's important that public participation opportunities span the regional diversity. I would conclude by highlighting that even though the public participation opportunities in Sudan's national dialogue were less than what one would hope and even though it was much less inclusive and ultimately a reconciliation exercise between the government and its closely allied parties, I think that there are opportunities during the implementation process for the dialogue to possibly regain some small amount of legitimacy by including groups that boycotted the dialogue in discussions about how to implement the recommendations and by consulting the public both in Khartoum and outside of Khartoum about how to implement these very many somewhat vague recommendations that resulted from the dialogue. So if I had to include a couple things in the toolkit it would be that participation matters at every stage of the process. I think that there's a tendency not to bring in the general public until a later stage and I think that the processes can garner more legitimacy when participation is included at an earlier stage. And I would also add that for national dialogues there is great value in thinking through the implementation of these processes before they even start. Too often national dialogues will result in dozens, hundreds, even thousands of recommendations without a clear plan for how they can be implemented through law and policy. And with that I'll conclude and I look forward to your questions. Thanks so much Elizabeth for your comments taking us into the national dialogue processes which certainly is a key component and relates to processes of inclusive peace processes and including people. I am now gonna turn to Michael Shippler who's going to talk about Nepal and I wanted to welcome the ambassador from Nepal who is here, Ambassador Arjun Kharky. And I just wanna do a little plug for Nepal. It's near and dear to my heart. We worked at USIP for about a seven year period right at the end of John Andalind too when the peace processes and other processes together with search for common ground on a dialogue process bringing together police, community, political parties and the government. And the government had always been very supportive of that process and there's still legacy there today. So I just wanted to thank the ambassador and his predecessors for their support over the years. So I will turn now to Michael who will actually talk specifically about the peace process and the outcome in Nepal. Great, thank you Colette, Mr. Ambassador. It's really a pleasure to be part of the CPRF. The forum feels really more important than ever somehow for our community to be talking about our role in this rapidly changing world. So you've also given me quite a tall order to follow such a distinguished panel of experts with so much experience. I will bring a couple of stories and experiences of my own in Nepal. I spent four years there right after John Andalind and working with Colette and team there as well. In November of 2006, I spent quite a lot of time in a place called Salyan which is in the mid-hills of Nepal which is really was the Maoist heartland during the war. And it happened to be there the day that the comprehensive peace agreement was signed. And anybody who works on Nepal and knows Nepal has seen the iconic photographs and images of Prachanda who had led the Maoist rebellion signing the comprehensive peace agreement with Girija Prasad Kaurala, the Prime Minister. The moment was extraordinary. It lay out a roadmap for what was essentially to become a restructuring of the state, a redefining of the national identity and a transformed way in which the citizens would engage with their country. And at the time I was sitting in a hotel in this guest house. It was in the hills so the guest houses lay really on the side of the hill and downstairs. There was a group of youth we had gathered from across all different kinds of dividing lines who had come in fact some of them at great risk themselves. Young men and women from all across the district who were sitting together talking, had been talking over a few days about their role in peace building and they were singing and dancing and building relationships in a way that they hadn't had the opportunity ever to do in the 10 years of war that had affected their district and their country. In the morning we brought them together and I expected in some ways a little bit of an elation. There was an elation in the country especially in Kathmandu at the end of this. This group of youth looked at each other. They said, okay, well probably not much is gonna change here today. So let's get on with what we can do. And they began clamoring for a role and they began looking and saying, what change can we make? What role do our generation have in transforming this society? Who are we now today? This was nine years before the passage of Security Council Resolution 2250. How many people here know about 2250? Just raise your hand. Okay, so maybe 20% of you. So we have a ways to go in terms of educating all our field about this critical Security Council Resolution, which in some ways is a resolution that follows on 1325. It's a resolution that provides a map, a legal framework for the participation of youth in peace processes and the prevention of violence. I really urge everybody to go and take a look at it. It's a resolution that was passed in December of 20, not last year, 2015, with a co-sponsorship of the kingdom of Jordan and the United States. It reflected what we were seeing all over the world. Groups of young people entering into peace processes at community levels, recognizing that they themselves had a really critical role to play in any kind of implementation of a political agreement that may have been occurring in their society. What happened in Nepal in the following months and years, and in fact, the decade of implementation of the peace process was quite exceptional. Youth began to self-organize and gained the support and traction of a host of international organizations, Search for Common Ground and others, USIP and others, who began to really engage with youth-led civil society groups in particular, but also youth wings of political parties to really look at and forge a concrete and powerful role in implementing what was a political process, but at the community level. And there was sort of a mantra that a few of us used to bat around. Wars are decided in rooms like this one, and peace processes begin, or peace accords are signed in rooms like this one, but wars are fought in communities and implemented, and peace processes are implemented in communities as well. And youth recognition of this was very powerful. Last year, a couple of years ago, actually a coalition of organizations, say the children and a few others, including us, put together an evaluation to really understand what had this groundswell of youth participation contributed to the peace process in the country. And there were four particular results that emerged from that evaluation, and I had one of my own. One is that in areas where youth were active, playing a major role, there was an increased awareness among citizens about the transition of the country, and about their role in the peace process itself. Secondly, that there were increased relationships, or the way that the evaluators defined it was cohabitation, but there was evidence of reduced discrimination, which meant that youth organizations were really addressing the key root causes of conflict in those communities around caste discrimination, class discrimination, ethnic divisions, and ethnic discrimination as well. There was evidence of reduced violence in those areas where youth were involved in peace building activities, and I would add on, some studies that we had done has shown evidence that youth involved in community organizing who had an opportunity to play a role leadership in their own communities, they themselves were a lot less likely to be involved in adversarial violent politics. And fourth, that there was increased support to those vulnerable groups, which meant that those groups who had the most kind of core grievances, which fueled the war in the first place, began to see more service delivery, more opportunities to be engaged in the economy and social fabric of their society. The fifth one I would add is that we saw youth play a major role in the facilitation of reintegration of ex-combatants. There were 11,000 children who served in the war and the People's Liberation Army, and many, many other children who were involved in violent activities of different ways. Youth groups, youth organizations really understood, and you would hear a mantra of this all the time from them, that the reintegration of ex-child soldiers was the front line of reconciliation in the society, and that young people had a really critical role to play in facilitating that re-entry. And we saw evidence of a real shift in dynamics from an evaluation that we conducted, where at the end of the war, the suspicion of ex-combatants coming back was at a very high level. And we saw that through the work of youth groups and through the work of communications and media, there was a transformation of attitudes among parents whose children were in the conflict and among other community leaders. And where there had been suspicion and fear, there was mostly trust, acceptance and a recognition that young people who had fought had a right and a critical need to reintegrate and live a full and healthy life. And so youth were actually able to go straight at some of the most critical root issues that were dividing the society in a way that sometimes the elder political leaders in government were not always able to do. So we drew, I've drawn a few principles out of that experience. The first is that in implementation of any peace agreement, one of those critical pillars is about informing the public. There's always a ton of misinformation, rumors that spread, a lack of knowledge, especially when you have a comprehensive, multi-dimensional political agreement that's being implemented that may be complicated to digest simply. So informing the public about really what's occurring and how all the different actors are playing a role is really central. And so of course, naturally the media plays a huge role in use of communications and multi-dimensional communications tool is fundamental and central to that. The second is around facilitating public participation. So you've spoken quite a bit to this. For me, what the real critical element here is around creating channels, again through media, for the public to contribute to the national discourse and national dialogue around the change of their society. The third is to localize peace-building efforts and to recognize that even if there is a national armed conflict, most violent conflicts are deeply personal. People know those who are involved. In Nepal, you could ask any of the youth in that group in Salyan and other places, do you know anybody in the war? And every single one will say, I have a cousin on the Maoist and I have a brother in the army. You would hear that kind of mantra all the time. And the conflict dynamics that were fueling the Maoist movement and the subsequent ethnic-based movements that came later were deeply local and so local peace-building efforts are fundamental. The fourth is around creating cultural touchstones. So I describe the image of Prachanda and Girija Prasakorela signing a peace agreement. I think if you look at different peace agreements, that image of people who have been enemies for generations, who've been fighting wars against each other, standing, shaking hands, albeit occasionally reluctantly, sometimes is an enduring one, it's a transformational one. But it's really fundamental to create opportunities and channels for people to perceive that the war is over. And a quick anecdote on this not in Nepal related but in Sierra Leone, search for coming around was really fundamentally involved in the end of the war there and played a big role in really educating, communicating to the broader public around the peace process and particularly around the DDR efforts. And one of the things that we did there was to create a radio talk show. It was called Throw Away the Gun. And it had two co-hosts, a guy by the name of Fode and a guy by the name of Rashid. Rashid had been a commander of the RUF, had been in RUF from its very early days and Fode was the commander of the Civil Defense Force, a pro-government civil defense force in the city of Bol. And the two of them co-hosted this radio show educating soldiers about what they needed to do to access DDR services and being able to educate the public about really what does reintegration look like. And what they found is that just by coming on the air together, when people would say, hey, commander Fode and commander Rashad are on the air together, wow, you know this war is over. Maybe I do need to put my gun down. And that was the evidence that we saw. And just the side story that I'll close on I had dinner with these two gentlemen.  And I was kind of taking it back. And Fode said, brother Rashid, you invaded my city. What was I supposed to do? There is a certain elation that comes with reconciliation and how you create those kinds of moments to become cultural touchstones, to be things that people who've gone through the horrors of violence and who to be able to touch to actually feel is really fundamental to actually bringing a society along through the actually major tumultuous transition that you're creating. And so linking what can be a very dry political exercise on paper of how does federalism work and how does taxation and revenue with that experience that people have in their daily lives. That is what creates in a lot of ways the broader public consensus that's critical and fundamental for a peace process to take hold. Thank you, Michael. I am now going to ask one question to each of the panelists. So get your, if you haven't already, get your writing utensils. And if you have any questions that you want to be fed in after this, we will take them and pose them. And if you could, if you have a specific question to a specific person, then go ahead and put their name on it. Otherwise, we'll invite the panelists to volunteer. So the first question is going to go to Ulaj. What are the most effective approaches to fostering inclusive peace process, specifically in your view, how best can the public be involved and when? I would be able to tell you by saying what doesn't work. I think that's easier. What doesn't work is a top-down national dialogue process. And that's why I argue the Kurdish peace process in Turkey did fail. They created this council of wise people and most of which were actually celebrities. Some were movie stars, some were actually pop stars. And yes, a couple representatives from the civil society, a total of 63 people. They divided these 63 people, wise people, across seven regions in Turkey. And what they did, they gathered in different clubs. They had, and I think that's where the transparency comes into play, meetings behind closed doors. So nobody did really know the conversations that were held between these people. So it was structured by the Turkish government. The participants were reverted by Ankara and whatever's been spoken were behind the closed doors. So that's created a certain sense of alienation by the public. So obviously transparency is one thing that we need to be aware of, that accompanies a more of a bottom-up approach. And secondly, I would argue the sequencing of national dialogue is quite important. At what stage of the peace process would be more constructive to include a larger national dialogue on the ground about the prospects of peace, such as the examples I think Michael and Elizabeth rightly pointed out that would bring in former combatants together and basically foster a joint vision of peace for all members of the society. Well, that never was a possibility in Turkey because there was never an agreement about the sequencing of opening the peace process to national dialogue, whether it is before during or after there was this missing link between the already existing, let's say, networks at the local level and obviously with the political leaders. And there was never an intention by the government actually to really foster these links. So once you have that missing link, then you also have this really poisonous element of mistrust. And for that reason, I think we need to be aware of the sequencing and when to involve the public really as a key stakeholder. So that might as well. Okay, thank you, Lash. If you have your cards, go ahead and pass them to my colleague, Tina, with the yellow scarf. So, Mari, what would you say is the one greatest impediment to inclusion in the implementation of peace processes agreements? If you had to say the greatest impediment and what does that impediments impact on the implementation have on durable peace? A lot of it depends upon the work that's been done before the agreement and the work that is left to be done after the agreement. I think mostly peace process need a societal shift, usually around inclusion and fairness, and having to start that process too much of it after the agreement is very hard, is very waiting. One of the things I sometimes say is that we in the field sometimes talk about peace processes as win-win agreements, they're not. We should stop saying that. They're actually lose-lose agreements. And one of the problems is how do leaders sell that losing compromise agreement to their people? The reason they take so long is actually because both sides want to lose the least and they're keeping an eye out about who's going to have to make more compromises. So when a peace agreement is signed, that's the big question. And how much are we going to lose as opposed to the other side? And I think it needs a very delicate balancing between leaders saying we won and there are costs and being able to sell that. For instance, the Oslo agreement, it's very clear from talking to people who were involved in that, that neither side had prepared the ground for compromises. Somehow our other people were still convinced that they could win and the work had not been done at ground level to make sure that people knew they were not going to get all that they had hoped for. And leaders who had promised everything were now facing a situation where they could only deliver part of what they had offered. So I think one of the most difficult things in implementation is people coming to terms. They will do everything possible to try to not come to terms with the fact that they actually are going to have to lose something. So I think therefore you need an awful lot of work before agreements are put into place that people have talked about compromises because the first time people have to talk about compromises, they hate it. Basically, I've been in Israel recently where people are beginning to have to talk about a possible one state solution and many people are avoiding that. But the more people talk about it, the more they can come to terms with that might be a possibility. So I think that's the difficulty in implementation, the preparation for it being a lose-lose agreement, the preparation leaders need to do on that basis, and also the hard slog it's going to be to put in place the many difficult issues that there are. Time tables we now know are really critical, they're really important, and commissions that can help with the implementation are really important as well. Thank you, Mari. Jonathan, how do we measure inclusion? There's a tendency in wanting to measure the impact of things and understand that so often that derives from the need to justify why you're getting money to do these kind of things and trying to convince donors of the value of what you're doing. And all too often I think when you talk about inclusion there's a risk of being accused of the word being shallow or short-term or it being hard to attribute to the diverse causes and actors where the change has come from and that the outcomes can be somewhat intangible. So I think it's been really important in recent years for our community to think more clearly about how you measure things like inclusion and a lot of work's been done on sort of quantifiable approaches and undoubtedly it's important to count numbers. So when I was telling you about our work in the Philippines I mentioned that 3,000 people had been reached and we were able to break that down and think how many of those were indigenous women, how many were women from rural areas, how many were women from urban areas, which age groups. And that's important to help you think through what you're trying to design in your work and are you reaching representative communities. But I think there's growing awareness that it's the quality of inclusion that you really need to grapple with. And it's really important to think about the relative relations between different groups and people both horizontally and vertically. How do they relate to other relevant communities, other relevant constituencies, how do they relate to power holders and what kind of opportunities and access to leverage change come out of those relationships. So some of the questions I think we need to ask ourselves in our effort to measure this impact might be around whether or not the communities we're working with are more aware of the rights that they have that are outlined in agreements that we're seeing trying to be implemented. Our communities, well, the communities think about whether they have better access to existing state institutions or whether new institutions that are part of agreements might give them more access. And also I suppose a question that I think challenges us a lot is do peace processes encourage people to move into a different space, a different identity space or do they just entrench existing spaces? And I think some of these questions don't necessarily give you straightforward quantifiable data, but by thinking about them in a qualitative way, you're actually answering questions that enable you to design your work more effectively and thereby have more of an impact. Okay, thank you, Jonathan. Elizabeth, can you give us a reason or two why we should be skeptical of national dialogues as an answer in every circumstance? Yes, I definitely can. I think there are many pitfalls to national dialogues and as we continue this research with every month that passes, I sort of find a new one. So I'll try to limit myself to two or three. For a national dialogue to take place and really include people across the country, you need to have some basic enabling conditions and these include the absence of all-out warfare. Many of you have heard about the current proposal in South Sudan to carry out a national dialogue there. In theory, I'm supportive of any efforts to further peace in South Sudan, but I really question whether you could have meaningful participation across all groups when so many people are trapped or displaced by conflict. I also think we've seen that national dialogues have become a very trendy term over the past three or four years, especially with the Tunisian Quartet winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And so they've become this convenient big leaf in some ways for leaders that are seeking to cement their own power or to just rubber-stamp the decision. And we could rattle off five to ten examples of leaders who have thrown around the term national dialogue over the past couple years as a way to make their citizens think that they really want to hear from them or get the international community off their back. So I think we need to be very careful to not buy into that. And then sometimes we see national dialogues that happen on a recurrent basis in a country. In the Central African Republic, we've seen three national dialogues since 2000. These take up a lot of resources and I think that they can be very useful processes for redesigning the relationship with the state for helping a country emerge from conflict. But if a national dialogue is happening three times in 15 years, then it's not working. And the permanent institutions are pretty badly broken. So I think you could make a good argument in that case that some attention should be paid rather than instead of to a national dialogue to reforming the institutions so that they can address conflict and inequality. Thanks so much, Elizabeth. So, Michael, you're going to be... I was going to use a baseball term, running bad up hitter. What is running cleanup on the... I don't remember. Something like that. You're the last batter of my questions. So the question is, does the push for inclusion, whether that be political, social, economic, in a process create a backlash from those whose authority or power may be displaced? And if so, how can that be addressed so that you have a durable peace? Picking up a little bit about what Mari was saying, that there isn't going to be a win-win. And so how do you look at that from your experiences? Great. A couple of things. I think that conceptually the concept of inclusion, I think this is something that's debated quite a lot. And I think that if we start with the assumption that inclusion causes displacement of power brokers, we're already setting up the discussion on inclusion as if it were an adversarial exercise. And we talk a lot in this field of the idea of expanding the tent, right? So the idea of inclusion is not to say, okay, you're a representative of this ethnic minority group. And so now you can represent your minority group in the power circles, right? It's actually about saying the concept of power needs to be broadened and created in a way that allows for multiple voices to contribute to decision-making in the society. And that's of course a fundamental concept. So I think if we start with that assumption, then we're in a lot of trouble from the get-go. I think that there are plenty of cases of backlash. I think it emerges more from failed expectations that are failed to be met. Most insurgencies are built on a kind of core, if we're talking about an armed conflict that's insurgency, are built around a set of core grievances around exclusion. And they're built on a whole narrative saying, we're going to create power for this group and we're going to create power for you and your government. And when a peace agreement that emerges, that's a lose-lose, usually a political compromise or certainly some kind of a freezing of the political power dynamics at the moment it's signed, happens typically actually people who have been marginalized are not suddenly included in the power structures of their society and this is what we saw in Nepal. Also, those involved in leading an insurgency or anti-state armed movement now are trying to convert to a political party typically or a political actor and how they're able to bring along their constituency to play in that new political arena is their biggest challenge, which is again what we saw in Nepal. The relationship between the Maoist leadership and its broader constituency was fraught from the day that the peace agreement was signed and the initial kind of circle of people who were brought into power by the Maoist leadership were not representative actually of the Dalit, the Taru, the Medici, the other minority communities in the country and so there was a, the backlash came from there and actually you had basically a splintering of ethnic-based groups who were saying, wait a minute, we had all these promises made to us about power and involvement and inclusion and yet actually that hasn't happened on day one and so our expectations haven't been met and then they immediately sought to challenge the actual system itself and look for ways in. At the same time there, you had people who were in the more powerful group, the Hill, people from the Hills who were Brahmins and Chetris so upper castes saying, oh you know, Brahmins and Chetris can't get jobs anymore and so the sense of persecution and victimhood suddenly was all across the entire spectrum and that was a really critical challenge that has actually in some way shaped the entire political environment forward. In my view, I'm sure Mr. Ambassador and others who know Nepal a lot better than me may have different views on this but this is some of those challenges. Thank you, Michael. Okay, now we're going to move to the questions that you've all posed and it's about 10 minutes to 11 so I think we can go, we can go over. Can we go over? We can go over. We're going to be inclusive. We're not going to stop voices. So let me start with the first one and the question is when you talk about public participation what percentage of the whole population should be engaged for public participation to be successful and how do you ensure public participation is representative of all sectors of the population? Is there somebody who would like to take that? Not I can direct it? Percentages? Oh, great, Mari. We've been talking a lot and the field has been talking a lot about integrated approaches, systemic approaches and I think I want to relate it to what we did in Northern Ireland. You need to have involved, as many as are needed to transform the society into a context where the peace process can be implemented and sustained. That may sound like a mouthful, but in most contexts you'll find that it's not just a few elite politicians, you'll find it's also the institutions that are in need of re-changing. You'll find that it's things like the educational systems, the development systems, it's just so much that actually needs to happen and I know many in our field quail at the thought of trying to change such but I think the evidence is that you need to help others within many of these institutions to also shape and shift their processes. So let's say you have a situation where certain people have never been involved in, for instance, sufficient education or people are being left out because of poverty levels, etc. All of those are actually going to dog you in terms of having a sustainable peace process. So when you say how many people need to have involved, it depends on the way society already is. So, for instance, in Northern Ireland, there were educational systems that were open to all. So we did not need to do much with those except to try and make sure that people met through them and learn together. However, there were many places like the Fire Society, the Fire Organizations, the Police Organizations, which were really sectarian in nature. So in terms of getting those involved, it was critical because we could not move into a future where major organizations dealing with security are not involved. So when you ask how many people need to be involved, it's as many as need to change a society so that it could become a stable society that augurs for inclusion and augurs for the power of people to be involved in participation. I think our field often runs from this. We feel we've done enough when we've looked at the political process and got the elites involved. But, for instance, I was very interested in Jonathan talking about Mindanao because I know some of the people involved in that. And, of course, the question must be, what are the institutions in Mindanao? Are they fit for the kind of peace process that you've developed? If they're not, who's going to take them forward? So that's the question that we're left with. I think we have to look further than peace processes and see what's going to ensure that they actually stay sustainable. Can I just add something to that final point about Mindanao because I absolutely agree with what Mari says. I think an additional element to it is also the degree to which the participation renders institutions, processes, and outcomes legitimate. But because if they're not perceived as legitimate, the likelihood is that they will be undermined by actors that have a sanction over whether or not they can hold. So I think it's about the quality and quantity of participation, but also the quality means does the participation render outcomes legitimate? Jonathan, sticking with you for a moment and picking up on that, there's a question that relates to the issue of spoilers, which you had referenced in your comments. In cases where spoilers may be unwilling to negotiate or compromise, how can peace processes move forward? Interesting. One of the things that we found in Northern Ireland was one of the things we did when we got the peace group, the ceasefires, was we actually developed processes for the politicians, the paramilitaries to learn about politics. And within that process, there were not only the loyalist groups but also the nationalist groups. Sinn Féin had their own group to do this. But the leftover Republicans that we see at the moment were people that never became engaged in the political processes, and therefore they still remain as spoilers. And actually if you talk to the people, there are very few in number, but a dozen people with a few bombs are enough to cause chaos in what they're doing. And you think it's for ideological reasons, but it turns out that they were left out when the agreements were made. They did not find a place for themselves, and therefore they remain as spoilers. So that was obviously missing from the agreement, and we are still paying for that, small as they are in numbers. Thank you. I'm now going to ask Ulash, in building a virtuous cycle, how high is the risk that public participation is destructive to peace dialogues and or the cycle? Oh, sorry. Both of the last two questions came from Twitter. So thank you, those of you who are asking questions also on Twitter. That's a tough one. I don't know the baseball terminology for fastball. Yeah, yeah. That's a fastball. Yeah. Look, I think public peace processes, one of the bigger challenges is that, you know, there is no really a marketing industry, right, that would really wrap the whole process in a shiny wrap and be able to basically present it to the public. So what happens, and this is something I think we need to talk a little bit deeper about it, especially in authoritarian societies, what happens is generally the government is trying to wrap it up in the type of, let's say, shiny packaging that it likes the public to see this process. So it depends on who does the marketing for the public peace process. And then we need to be aware, and I think that might actually be the case in Sudan as was the case in Turkey, generally this national dialogue and other forms of reaching out to public and strategies alike get hijacked by the agenda of the authoritarian leaders or the system. So it ends up being, okay, if you do not, if you guys don't agree with me, in the end of the peace process, and this exactly more or less what happened in Turkey, that the process became really the sole property of the government, and once the public opinion and one of the stakeholders decided to challenge whether the Turkey's then prime minister should be elevated into an executive presidential stature, then the whole public peace process was put into question by the same person who managed to sell it to the public, and he basically told, look, if you guys don't agree with me, I'm willing to let go of this peace process. So we should be very careful about it, about A, who does the packaging and B, whether that the color of the packaging is really agreed upon by all stakeholders. Sure, and while you're adding it, can you answer the question after that, you spoke of the need for a neutral party to facilitate national dialogue, as well as the importance of implementation, so we want, if you could expand your answer to also talk about what role does that neutral party or civil society facilitator play in ensuring the implementation, so if you could link the two thoughts together. Public participation question and how it can be effective, I thought that your comments were quite sage, and I think that it's important, I mentioned transparency of processes and public participation and complementary concepts. If a public is well informed of the agenda and issues that are being debated, they'll be better empowered to participate in a meaningful way. I've heard a few anecdotes about recent national dialogues, including one in Yemen where the delegates were somewhat hastily dispatched to their home areas, and they were holding these consultations with people, members of their communities, and nobody really knew what was going on, people who sort of showed up, and in one village in Yemen, a gentleman said, I want the national dialogue to make sure that my village looks like Dubai in five years, and so that was what he wanted, but that was not what the national dialogue could deliver, it's certainly not what the government of Yemen could deliver. Had he been better sort of better empowered to participate, he might have been able to make more realistic contributions. In Senegal there were committees in each state or province where the members of the committee would regularly brief the community members on the agenda items and ask for their input on different agenda items as they were unfolding, and because there was that constant line of communication, people were better able to participate, and there were really substantive reports that came out of actually I think it was 41 local governance units and then diaspora communities in and Canada France and the US, so that was a public participation process where people were better able to participate. That's a great question about how the neutral party can help implementation. I think that a credible having a credible party from the outset like the Tunisian quartet that I mentioned, the Four Civil Society organizations, or Amidou Maktar Mbao who was a Senegalese retired politician and former Director General of UNESCO, that increases the probability that the results of the national dialogue will be implemented because it's more likely to have been seen as a credible process, and it's incumbent on the person who's facilitating the dialogue or the people, the organizations in the case of Tunisia to establish an implementation committee or a follow-up committee, a comic data that is representative of the different stakeholder groups. It should be as inclusive as the process itself, and to make sure that it is empowered by establishing, clearly stipulating its relationship to the constitution making process to the national legislature, to the ministries, so on and so forth. So I think to sum up, I think a neutral convener can help to ensure that a neutral implementation body is in place, and I think civil society can play a really important watchdog role in following the implementation committee and making sure that it's doing its job in passing those recommendations to the relevant institutions of government. We are running over just a few minutes. If anyone has to leave don't be embarrassed, please feel free to leave. We have three more questions, so I'm estimating we will probably wrap it up by 11.10. So I just want to make sure we get the questions in, but feel free if you can't stay. The next question, Jonathan, what level of risk do women face as a result of strong resistance to their participation? Where that risk is high, how can it best be mitigated? You talked a lot about participation by women in the processes that you discussed. So I didn't quite catch that. What level of risk do women face? Yes, what level of risk do women face as a result of strong resistance to women's participation? Where the risk are high, if that's the case, how can it best be mitigated? Obviously it depends on the context, but I think that the level of risk can be very high and it's high for, I think we need to recognize it's high for women in particular context, it can be high for anyone who's trying to engage in a peace process, so how do you mitigate it? Well, I think it's really important to think about coalitions and allies and support people to connect with one another. It's important to think about where are the allies within a system and where are the external avenues for support and I think increasingly whilst we recognize the importance of the ownership for change within a society, external actors can play a hugely important role, whether it's through accompaniment and whether it's through solidarity whether it's through providing resources to enable people to extend their reach, or whether it's through highlighting the risks that people take and sharing some of that through the political leverage that outsiders can provide. Okay, thank you, Mark. Can I ask you to just briefly respond to that, also given your discussion about the role that the women's groups played in the process in Northern Ireland? Well, you have to remember, as Jonathan said, the context is important and within the Northern Ireland context women were generally not targeted and they were not subject to violence in the same way that men were, although many were killed in bombings and etc. It was very hard for the women's coalition to come to terms with the reality of what politics was like. I actually remember sitting with some of them in what we call the forum. It was the first institution set up after the Belfast agreement and they were subjected to catcalls and moving and rudeness, so much so that we actually set up what we called a crying room where we had a lot of accompanied them and have tissues available and chocolate and tea because they could not believe the level of sexism within the forum. But interestingly the level of sexism was not just towards them, it was actually towards the women who were within the political parties where the men were very snide and the men were very rude. Now, it's a measure of how much things have changed in that we now have a woman has taken the place of Martin McGinnis and we actually have a woman in charge of Ian Paisley's party. So things have moved on and interestingly many of the political parties will agree that it was the incoming of the women's coalition that actually made them change their mind about the fact that women could be powerful and useful in politics. So looking back it was a period of which our women suffered not from violence but from appalling psychological intimidation and seen now that it's been taken as a natural that they will take their place and fairly high places in politics. So we've been glad we've had that kind of an effect. Thank you, Jonathan and Mari. Michael, I'm going to have you have you that cleanup the last question and there's a two part question. One relates specifically to Nepal and can you talk a little bit about the localized processes that you mentioned and whether state the states nurtured that and how that fits in and then could you also just give an example of an organization that might do that type of work or national dialogue for conflict resolution in the U.S. In the U.S. That one's from I'm looking very good. That should be the next forum. The localized processes, so there were a couple of different things that happened. There was a formal process that was set up that had that came to sort of I don't know I had a middle level of effect. Basically there was a set up of local peace which was done building on the South African model actually brought up by some South Africans who shared it, it was a national legislation and those local peace committees were essentially district level bodies of people who came from different political parties, media businesses, etc. who were tasked with monitoring local conflict dynamics and preventing violence the result of that was that in reality their effectiveness depended entirely on the dynamic nature of one or two leaders within and so there were certain districts where you had really powerful responses that really tamped down violence and others where the local committees were just in name or just sort of place where people got together to argue. Similarly the political parties set up parallel mechanism called the all party mechanism and the political parties at the time were really dominant players and everything at the local level and so that was a little bit more of a problem solving forum so you had a couple of those formalized mechanisms but the other local processes that I think may have been a lot more powerful in terms of really resolving local conflict were the local community radio stations which we worked with very closely and a whole host of us were really working closely with to help them shape their role as problem solvers essentially. We set up for instance a local radio talk show where we would bring power brokers and people who are sort of powerless or perceived to be powerless together so you know landholders and landless representatives of landless people or you know the leader of a local women's cooperative together with a local government official who's handling small businesses to address really the kind of key dividing issues that were facing that community and really were able to resolve all sorts of conflicts through those kinds of mechanisms so there was a whole proliferation of that kind of effort locally generated from people who really wanted to affect their own communities in terms of the states look I mean we're I mean thank you for that nice easy question to wrap us up that came from a twitter yeah look I mean the you know we're at the front end of a you know a pretty tumultuous time here and you know almost everybody who's in the middle of what's going on is in an adversarial stance against one another and that's you know we're all peaceful to all the Americans here we're talking about how do we foster national dialogue in Sudan or Nepal or Sri Lanka you know how do we foster dialogue here what actually how can we actually challenge ourselves to step actually a little bit out of the adversarial position that we've stepped into and actually seek to be conveners I went down and looked at the inauguration and I saw you know I walked around the protests and I saw tons of Trump supporters and protesters talking to each other in street corners talking about why like what is it that made you support this guy and like why are you against this guy and actually some of the conversations were powerful and civil how do we bring that to the national discourse and what role each of us have to play in that there are groups like convergence there's a group the millennian I think it's called the millennial action project which are seeking to bridge red blue divides and I think we need to bring to bear the power of our field onto this country right now it's maybe more critical than ever before thank you Michael and I also want to thank all of the panelists and Jonathan and Mari for sticking with us on Skype thank everyone who is part of the discussion all of you here as well as watching on the webcast and Twitter and I just want to close picking up on what Michael said the power of having forums like this and when you see that there are lessons and struggles and challenges but also ways that people are working together across countries even though there's different contexts there's a lot of common lessons that everyone is sharing here and I think it's really powerful when across a theme like peace processes or conflict resolution we can look at other countries look at our own experiences and share across those so that as we talk about the big tent the big tent can be not just in a country but a big tent across the countries and then a big tent worldwide where we're looking at how can we all play a part and what role that we play in our own societies and communities so I just want to thank you for staying with us I said 1110 it's 1112 so I was a little off but thank you and have a good rest of the Tuesday


We have in this country today a major crisis in terms of clean drinking water. I believe that as soon as possible we have got to phase out fracking. I think the evidence is overwhelming that fracking is harming our aquifers. Secretary Clinton has not only supported fracking, but as Secretary of State try to push that technology on other countries. We have a disagreement on that issue.