Root of Conflict Podcast

Episode: Somaliland’s Independence

featuring

Bashir Goth

interviewed by

Deqa Aden and Joshua Charles

October 26, 2022

Full Transcript

Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts.

Reema Saleh: You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you’ll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: The Republic of Somaliland is a de facto sovereign state in the Horn of Africa. Declaring independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland is a self-governing country with democratic elections and a distinct history on the continent, but it’s still considered part of Somalia by the international community. In this episode, we speak with Bashir Goth, the head of the Somaliland Mission in the United States about how Somaliland has navigated state building without international recognition. We talk about democracy and development, and what Somaliland has to offer the world in the coming decades.

Deqa Aden: I’m Deqa Aden, a second year Master of Public Policy student and a Pearson Fellow.

Bashir Goth: I’m Bashir Goth, a Somaliland Representative to the United States.

Joshua Charles: I’m Joshua Charles. I’m a second year Master of Public Policy candidate and Pearson fellow.

Reema Saleh: Hi, my name is Reema. I’m a second year Master student and Pearson Fellow.

Joshua Charles: I think to begin, could you introduce yourself? What do you do? What’s your background?

Bashir Goth: Okay. Currently I’m the representative of Somaliland to the United States. You can say an ambassador. So, I do what any ambassador in the world does. Before that, I was working in different areas. I work in the oil industry as a corporate communication advisor. I work in the media as a journalist. And I worked in international organizations also as a communication advisor. That’s my background.

Joshua Charles: Okay. That’s quite dynamic. And so given that you have extensive experience working in the intersection within the policy space, and when thinking about the relationship between Somaliland and Taiwan, it’s pretty clear that there is a synergistic dynamic that mutually embraces each country’s path towards independence. To what extent does Somaliland have similar relationships in place that are a characteristic of the country’s relationship with Taiwan?

Bashir Goth: Taiwan’s relationship was a very strategic decision for Somaliland. We are two countries which are in similar situations, political and geopolitics also. We are both existing states in the world, democratic states, but not recognized internationally. Both of us are bullied by bigger countries, China in terms of Taiwan, and for us, although they kind of bully us, we’re very weak, our neighbor, but they claim Somaliland as part of their country. So that’s what brought us together. And not only that, but we have common values, like democracy and human values and free market economy and all kinds of things have brought us together. So that’s how we established ties with Taiwan.

Deqa Aden: Are there any other states like Taiwan that are also seeking independence that Somaliland attempted to build a relationship in?

Bashir Goth: No, actually, because Somaliland has a unique status, a unique situation, historical background, and the only one that’s actually similar is Taiwan. But other countries that are struggling… they have their own problems that are quite different from Somaliland. Somaliland was an existing state before, during colonialism, and after colonialism they became independent, and now they just went back to their past status. Taiwan is almost the same. Taiwan was ruling China, and then during the Civil War the rulers of China were defeated, and they ran to Taiwan and kept the Chinese government in Taiwan. So actually, they claim that they are the real Chinese government and represent the Chinese people. And they were representing China in the Security Council in the United Nations until 1971, when the United States recognized China, and then China took the United Nations seat. So, we are similar states, but we don’t reach out to other countries which are in a different situation.

Joshua Charles: Wow, and so when thinking about Somaliland’s path to independence, do you believe there… What do you think is required to get there? And do you believe that a strategic partnership with Taiwan will be significant to Somaliland attending its independence?

Bashir Goth: No, they will not, because we are both struggling for independence. We are both struggling for international recognition. So that’s what brought us together. But Somaliland relations with Taiwan can play another role, which is Taiwan is a very, very close friend of the United States, both economically, strategically, and politically. And they have a great influence in the United States also. So that could play a role in bringing the United States closer to Somaliland, because any country that establishes relations with Taiwan will definitely be, by default, a friend of the United States, because the United States cares about that. And any country that actually severs or cuts relations with Taiwan, the United States gives them [a] hard time also. So that’s one way, but the search for independence will just go on in its own way and through different other channels.

Deqa Aden: Just to follow up on that, I think it was very important that you highlighted that shared interest and similar stories are important for Somaliland, which is why also Taiwan’s path is quite similar to Somaliland as well. And since this relation that has been formulated very recently: in what ways has Somaliland benefited from Taiwan’s strategic partnerships? In what way did Taiwan benefit from Somaliland as well?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland benefited definitely. Taiwan is an economic giant in the world today, especially in what you call information technology. It is one of the leading countries in semiconductor and chips and making things like that. And in that way, Taiwan is helping Somaliland in different areas, in agriculture, in health, in IT. Recently, they started actually something that’s similar to a technology park in Somaliland. In training our coast guards… even yesterday some members of the Taiwanese coast guards arrived in Somaliland, and they were in Berbera. So, they’re helping Somaliland in different ways, in different sectors economically and in investment also. They’re investing in Somaliland energy, they’re starting oil exploration in different parts of the country very soon, next year actually, in collaboration with an international energy company. And that’s what they’re doing. So, they’re helping Somaliland in different ways.

Bashir Goth: Taiwan is also benefiting from Somaliland, because Taiwan needs a foothold in Africa. And they have relations with only one country in Africa, that’s Eswatini. No other country. So, when they establish relations with Somaliland, that gives them a foothold in that strategic area of the Horn of Africa. And then at the same time, Somaliland can play a role in winning friends for Taiwan from our neighboring countries, and that’s another way. One particular thing is that China is in Djibouti. They have a big base in Djibouti. So, when Taiwan is in Somaliland, and they’re watching what China is doing there, it’s just next door. So, they have a lot of benefits also from there strategically.

Joshua Charles: So, it’s quite interesting to hear that within Somaliland there will be oil exploration in the next year. Aside from oil, what other commodities and materials are untapped right now?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland is basically a virgin country. It’s untapped. We have a lot of minerals, we have a lot of resources that are buried underground, and it has to be tapped. And currently we know that we have oil and probably gas. It’s a great potential for that. But the economy of the country, actually the backbone of the country’s economy, is livestock. We export a lot of livestock on the hoof—that means live animals—to the Gulf countries, especially to Saudi Arabia. So mostly we earn our economy from livestock, and we have some other local companies that produce for domestic use, domestic consumption, but not for export. Usually for export for the country also depends on the diaspora remittance, which actually is like $800 million a year of remittance. That plays a huge part also. And then the local revenue, whatever. Berbera Port is a growing port and a very important port. It’s going to be a hub in the Horn of Africa soon, and that will actually be a game changer for the economy of Somaliland and for the whole region.

Deqa Aden: Speaking of economy, one of the main reasons people are always impressed with Somaliland is how self-sustaining it is, because Somaliland doesn’t get any foreign investment, it doesn’t have a seat in any of the major multilateral organizations. The question is, how does Somaliland manage to do that? And I’ve seen and heard that you are very much about Somaliland sustaining the way it is. And to quote what you said earlier, which is really a beautiful statement, is that we don’t want aid, we just want partnerships. And I think that is something that’s quite unheard of. I was just curious if you can just touch base on that a little bit more, for the people to know more about it as well.

Bashir Goth: Somaliland has actually proven that any African country can live without aid. It’s really a real example, if you want to see a country that’s surviving without aid, and we did it. We did it because Somaliland… Number one, there is a will. The will of the people, that they have to live with the conditions that they have. They found themselves in this condition by default. They found themselves that they cannot access international financial organizations. Then they have to find a way to live. That’s human innovation. Where there’s a need… necessity is the mother of invention. So they decide, the government of Somaliland and the people of Somaliland, decided that they have to live by their own means. So the revenue the government generates goes to usually public things like the government employees’ salary, the armed force salary, and some kind of public services. But the country actually survives by the private sector. We have a free market economy. So the free market, the private sector plays a big role. Almost 80% of the country’s economy is run by the private sector. That’s how we survive.

Joshua Charles: Wow, and so when thinking about the need for investment and thinking about the potential or a current existence of a domestic bond market, what does that look like at the moment? And if the domestic bond market isn’t developed at the moment, do you see that being a tangible solution to address some financial deficits?

Bashir Goth: We have a domestic market and a domestic private economy that’s actually ready for international partnership. They’re ready. They can do anything. They have the latest technology, they have a lot of money, they deal with the world, private sector. So they’re ready for partnerships. So the moment Somaliland gets international investors, the atmosphere, the environment’s ready. So that’s what we are counting on. Already there are some companies have come, and others are now on the way. And I think very soon Somaliland will have very good investment and partnership from the world.

Deqa Aden: Other economic partnerships that came to my mind is UAE, which has built a port in Somaliland, which has shown a great interest in the region, and DP World as well. And this made me think of this world of international affairs, where if you made an ally in one space, then you are also sending signals to also their enemies at times, or maybe their competitors in the market as well. Has there been ways where, when Somaliland partnerships with one state economically, that other states may reach out as well and show an interest?

Bashir Goth: Yes. For example, number one, DP World of the United Arab Emirates was the first one that broke the taboo that nobody can deal with Somaliland, because how can you have a signed international agreement with the country that’s not internationally recognized? Because later on, if there are problems, where are you going to go for and things like that? So that was a problem. Dubai DP World is a world port operator. They have I think they operate more than 83 ports all over the world, including ports in the United States. So, they know how to work, and they know Somaliland because Somaliland people and the United Arab Emirate people had a long history together of migration, working together, all kind of things. So they know the Somaliland people.

Bashir Goth: So they came, they saw the port, they saw the potential of the port in the whole region, and where it’s placed historically. Berbera Port in the ‘80s and Berbera Airport also in the ‘80s, it used to be a Soviet base. Then when the Soviets left, it has become an American port base during the Carter administration. Berbera Airport has the longest runway in Africa. One of the longest… Actually, it’s the longest when you look at the part that’s not run by plane, it is the longest runway in Africa. And the United States used that runway at one time as an emergency landing for the Space Shuttle in the ‘80s. So, Dubai came, they saw the potential of this and said we’re going to invest money in this. And the signed an agreement with the Somaliland government. They’re spending $450 million on that in two phases. First phase is over, second phase will be finished next year, and then it’s going to be state of the art port in the whole region. That’s number one.

Bashir Goth: Then the UK, after Brexit, they were looking for markets. They came to Berbera, and they know Somaliland. There’s nobody who knows Somaliland more than the British. And they said, “Okay, we are joining hands with DP World and we are going to invest in five even African ports, including in Berbera in Somaliland.” One in Egypt, one in Senegal, and some others, but Berbera was one of them. And the British are spending like 200-something million dollars for Berbera Corridor, roads coming from Berbera all the way to Ethiopia. And others will follow. I cannot say it now exactly, but I know that when I was talking to the Minister of Investment and Minister of Trade, they told me there is a number of companies that approach Somaliland for investment. So, it’s coming. It’s coming.

Joshua Charles: That’s exciting. That’s exciting. So, when thinking about UK’s relationship with Somaliland, it’s clear that there’s been some type of financial incentive for the UK to operate or to allocate capital to Somaliland projects. But outside of that financial relationship, politically, culturally, is there any type of dynamic that is of interest to you?

Bashir Goth: Yes. Culturally there is because Britain used to be the colonizer of Somaliland during the colonial period. There is a huge Somaliland diaspora in the UK, and Somalilanders have been in UK for a long, long time. Since 19th century, Somaliland seaman have been… They have established even areas in UK where they’re known. So culturally, there are long cultural ties. But yes, UK is after its own economic interest, but at the same time its strategic interest, because the place where Somaliland is located in the Horn Africa, the Gulf of Aden… You know, the Gulf of Aden sea coast, more than 11% of international oil tankers pass through that. Imagine that. So it’s a very strategic place, why all these countries are coming to have bases, for example, in Djibouti and other areas, because this is an economical nerve for the whole world. So they have an eye on that also. So a lot of things…

Deqa Aden: Going back to my also previous question. With all these new partnerships and all these companies coming from these different countries, you don’t also have to answer it either, has there been any negative consequences from building partnership with their opposing allies as well, or that’s not the case…

Bashir Goth: Not yet. Not yet.

Deqa Aden: Okay. That’s good.

Bashir Goth: Because we don’t have that many companies that have come. So not yet.

Deqa Aden: Okay. That’s good. That’s good to know. Now, moving back from economy to democracy, I think one of the most fascinating things about Somaliland is the latest freedom health score in 2022, which Somaliland scored higher than a lot of sub-Saharan African countries, including the Middle East, also including UAE as well and Qatar. And that is something that a lot of academics are really fascinated with. So, first question is, how did Somaliland build this democracy that people are just fascinated with?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland has actually built a democracy that’s a blend or a mix between traditional way that Somalilanders used to run their affairs and modern democracy. So, after the Civil War and the collapse of the former central government of Somalia, and when the people came together and they reclaimed their independence, they had to build their country back. So, they have to resort what they knew. Resorting to what they knew is how they used to run their country. So Somaliland people used to have a kind of pastoral democracy, which was natural democracy. People come, sit together under a tree, discuss things, no age barrier, sometimes gender barrier, everybody will have a voice. And then they will discuss, they’ll make a decision, and then that decision will be binding for everybody. And that’s how we have to do. When there is, for example, a conflict between clans, that’s how they used to solve. So that is our tradition.

Bashir Goth: And then with modern democracy, which we have to give credit to our founder, a guy who considered as a founder of Somaliland, who is Muhammad Ibrahim Egal, he was our independence leader in 1960, the first prime minister. And he was one of the independence leaders in Africa at that time. So he was a man who knew how democracy works. He was a man who went through this struggle of independence. So he became the president and he laid the foundation of Somaliland, modern democracy, and he knew how to deal with traditional… and win the trust of people, and he worked with that. So it was not a one person, but he was the leader, and the leader makes a difference everywhere. Mandela made a difference for South Africa, for example.

Bashir Goth: So he actually led this democratization of Somaliland. The Somaliland people were willing to do that, they adopted democracy. And over the last 31 years, there are more than five presidents that peacefully took over from each other the power. We are the only country in the Horn of Africa, for example… The second country could be Kenya. Kenya from 1963 when they became independent until now, there are only five presidents. Somaliland in 30 years, half of Kenya’s age, there are five presidents that replaced each other by universal election. One man, one person, one vote. That’s how we do it every time. Our parliament, our presidents.

Bashir Goth: And the unique thing about Somaliland, which is actually the only country that did that, the whole world, is we do our elections by… We use iris recognition, biometric identification. So that rules out any irregularities or rigging the election or things like that. So we are the first country in the world to use that biometric iris recognition. So international observers come to our elections, and there is not a single time that the international observers, including the IRA, which was the first to come, there is not a single time they did not testify that Somaliland elections was free and fair. Yes, in any election there’ll be some little here and there irregularities and problems, anywhere in the world. We have here in the United States, and we know that. But Somaliland actually has a very good record in that.

Bashir Goth: And that’s how the freedom… We have other problems also, for example. Freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is very, very good in Somaliland. Anybody can say anything against the government, against any institution, and against any organization. And we actually say in Somaliland we have more freedom than necessary, because anybody can say anything. But at the same time, we are a young democracy, so sometimes we have issues. For example, some reporters may be detained by the government because they said something, but that’s not literally because the government is against criticism, but it’s because we are fragile state, surrounded by a very tough neighborhood. These young reporters who are mostly unprofessional and untrained can just go to anybody and interview somebody who can say any flagrant statements that he wants to say against another clan, and that could cause a clash. That’s the time for some that person is detained. So things like that happen, which we don’t like, because freedom of speech has to be freedom of speech. But comparatively in our neighborhood, actually we’re the best.

Joshua Charles: Wow, that’s quite interesting. When considering the evolution of a democracy, like you mentioned, there will always be some issues that remain unaddressed in America. You have it within the politically elected officials, the representation can be more proportionate to the actual American population. Within Somaliland, from my understanding, there’s a lack of female representation within parliament. When that translates to policy, to the policy making process, what are some of the consequences of that, and what are some of the policies in place to amplify female representation within politics?

Bashir Goth: So generally, you’ll talk about political inclusiveness, inclusive politics, whether it’s female or any other people. Let me first go back a little and answer the question Deqa asked me. There [is a] very important factor I forgot. In Somaliland, we did not just dream when they came up with democracy. It went through a long process. And this long process was, for example, after we reclaimed our independence, we had more than probably ten community conferences in different parts of the country, where people came together to resolve local conflicts and local issues and things like that. And these went through states until it came to the grand meeting in Burao in 1994, where all the clans and everybody came together and they drafted the national charter for Somaliland, and Egal was elected. So it went through… It was a community-based process that started from the grassroots and then grew up all the way to the top.

Bashir Goth: Coming back to your question, political inclusiveness is always not an easy job. It’s a very, very difficult thing. You cannot satisfy all people all the time. There will always be gaps that has to be... There will always be improvements to be done. So we have these gaps, we have these shortcomings, but we try our best, and think all the communities are represented in Somaliland political institutions and political bodies. There are not elected women in our parliament, but they’re also represented in the government. They are in different parts of the government and departments and organizations and civil societies. Actually, women are very, very strong in civil societies. They have the strongest voice in civil societies. So they will come also to the political leadership one day, and they’re fighting for that, and we are helping them. But otherwise, we are moving forward. That’s what I can say.

Deqa Aden: I think just to build up on all the things you’ve said, mass misinformation is a threat to democracy, not only in Somaliland, across the world, and even the U.S. also struggling with social media and how that’s a threat to their strong democracy, which complicates freedom of speech. So this struggle you mentioned, it’s a struggle that a lot of countries have, and there’s a lot of debates about it, of how do we move forward? Because we want people to know the correct information and wouldn’t want misinformation to be the cause of civil war. As you said, we are a fragile state itself, and we’re right next to Somalia. And I think that’s really important to highlight, so I just wanted to also reemphasize that.

Deqa Aden: But going back even before that, I think the history of Africa in academic context, or in this part of the world, somehow it starts colonial times, as if there was no Africa before colonial times. So to me, it was really important when you mentioned that there was pastoral democracy even before colonial times, and there was Somaliland before the British came, and then that was part of the ingredients that made the democracy that we have right now. So the unfinished part of democracy, because there’s always going to be an unfinished part, and there’s the part we always admire, I’ve always been one of those people who admires Somaliland’s democracy because just no one knows about it, and it’s really fascinating. Where should the unfinished part focus on in the next couple of decades? Where should Somaliland’s unfinished democracy should work on… And as you said, democracy’s a project…

Bashir Goth: Yeah. Exactly.

Deqa Aden: It’s always constantly improving. So the unfinished part, how should we envision Somaliland in the next couple of decades?

Bashir Goth: The most important part for the unfinished parts would be women participation in Somaliland policymaking or decision making. That’s number one. Number two will be general political inclusiveness, which there are always grievances in Somaliland. Another thing will be, for example, every country has a constitution, but the constitution is a living document. It has to go through change all the time. Somaliland, over the last 30 years, we did not look back at our constitution. And that has to be done, and that will address a lot of constitutional problems in democracy of Somaliland. So I think these are the areas that we have to go through in the coming decade or years.

Bashir Goth: And another one will be youth employment. That’s a problem not only in Somaliland, but all over of Africa. By 2050, predictions are African population will be like 4 billion, and maybe 80% of that will be below 30. Imagine. How are you going get employment for that? It’s called the youth bulge. And the other African countries are suffering from that, and unemployment is really very high. What do you think of Somaliland, which doesn’t have access to international financial markets? It’s pretty difficult. So that’s another area also that we have to actually address.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. Definitely.

Joshua Charles: Right. Youth, that’s the future of any society, and I have quite a few friends who live in Uganda, and one of my friends, she just graduated from Makerere University within the last few months. She jokes around and she says, “I’m an unemployed youth.” But that’s an unfortunate reality for many people within that region of the world. So thinking about… Okay, it’s clear that Somaliland is not well integrated into the international financial system, but there is certainly potential. From the government’s perspective, what can be done to enhance the job market for youth? What are some of the strategic partnerships that can be in place to actually support the youth employment?

Bashir Goth: For now, what Somaliland government is doing, not only Somaliland government, but Somaliland government and together with the private sector, they are trying to do a lot of things actually. Number one is employment, whoever they can employ. That’d be a very small number. The private sector can employ more. That’s one thing. At the same time, it’s giving skills to young people, young graduates for example, skills that they can start their own businesses. So that’s another one. Give them small loans that they can start their own small businesses. That’s another way they can do it. And attracting international investment, which is a huge thing, because once investment comes to, for example, now Berbera Airport. It’s employing a lot of youth who have been trained and skilled, and they’re working there. So when investment comes, it will generate a lot of employment. So, when the economy grows, employment also grows with it.

Bashir Goth: So that’s what we are trying to do a lot of… but it’s very difficult to catch up, because thousands of students graduate every year, just like any other country. And they come to the market, and the market is very small, so imagine. But we are trying to find ways actually, every single day the government and private sector are coming up with new ideas and new ways. Even the youth are coming up with their own new ideas. So we’ll think that some of these will work out. Maybe like we survive without international aid, maybe we can also teach the world how to create employment for the youth… Could be.

Deqa Aden: Absolutely. Another point that I thought of was… I was also in Somaliland last year, especially working on a business incubator for youth for finding jobs. And it was shocking to me because oftentimes we market Africa as a… “There’s no education. We have to educate women. We have to educate the youth.” And I was like, no, education was never the problem. In fact, education itself is the problem, because you have a mass of graduates who are really high skilled, who are ready and want to use their skills. And that can lead to a lot of frustration, so sometimes the youth just want to leave the country and want to come to this part of the world where they can put their education to use. Has illegal migration… Has it been a problem? Because I couldn’t pinpoint, with just knowing how unemployment is such a big deal, where are these youth going?

Bashir Goth: Somaliland actually never had that big a problem with mass youth immigration, illegal immigration. We had some of our young people who actually went through illegal immigration, and they traveled through, for example, Ethiopia, Sudan, and from Sudan to Libya, and all the way to the Mediterranean, taking boats from the Mediterranean, from Libya. Some of them did that. A number of them did that, actually. But usually, we didn’t have that mass migration like other African countries have. For example, like the Sahel countries that thousands of young people, hundreds of young people, are every day crossing the Mediterranean and dying many of them there. We don’t have that. We don’t have that.

Bashir Goth: But the good thing about Somaliland is that we are a very close-knit community, so people help each other, families help each other, communities help each other. So young people don’t get actually… They may be unemployed, but they will always have a place to sleep, a place to eat something, a little pocket money. They will always have that, because their family, their larger family, will be helping, whether they are in the diaspora or inside or wherever. So the social cohesion of the Somaliland people is very important and helps them. But that will only take you so far, actually…

Deqa Aden: Only so far.

Bashir Goth: If you know the Middle East, what actually caused the Arab uprising was youth unemployment. And the Arabs have a lot of money, but because of the political system, youth could not get employment. So that’s what caused the Arab Spring. But then when the Arab Spring took place, then it ended up with a disaster, because when there is a movement and there’s no leadership and vision, then it ends up with chaos. So that’s also a good lesson for other countries, so Somaliland youth also see that. And I don’t expect anything like that happening in Somaliland, or maybe anywhere in Africa in the future. But it’s a problem worldwide, even in the United States. We have a lot of unemployment here, especially now. So that’s a big problem.

Joshua Charles: True. Especially within the last three years, unemployment rates have skyrocketed within America as well as in other parts of the world. When I have conversations about Africa, it seems that many people find it easy to generalize certain characteristics of individuals within the continent. But in reality, there are so many different identities, just like any other part of the world. So when thinking about the communal aspect of Somaliland, how do you think religion reinforces that propensity of the collective society?

Bashir Goth: Religion was traditionally part of our culture. It was just part of the Somaliland people’s culture. Religion was never a problem. It was not something that was separate from the Somaliland culture. But in the ‘90s and after the ‘90s, an alien type of Islam came to the Somaliland people from Arabia, like anywhere else in the world, and that infiltrated into the community. And what you see today in Somalia and Al-Shabaab is actually an alien culture, alien kind of Islam that came to our region, came from Arabia, especially from Saudi Arabia, called Wahhabism. And that’s a radical school of Islam that doesn’t tolerate any other lifestyle.

Bashir Goth: So actually, we suffered from that for quite some time, but because of our traditionally strong foundations of Islam, we came over that. So we don’t have that problem. That’s why we don’t have in Somaliland any radical violence in our country. We don’t have that. So our traditional Islam came back, that’s a Sufi Islam, traditional Islam, that was part of the people’s culture that was spiritual. And we live with that. That’s our culture. That’s our culture.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. And I think that’s also another shock to the world, how is Somalia a hub for one of the biggest terrorist organizations, and Somaliland is nothing like that, and they’re right next door to one another? So I’m glad you mentioned that it somehow all comes down to culture and the traditions and the infrastructure that was there before all these problems.

Bashir Goth: Exactly.

Deqa Aden: Speaking of research, one of the main gaps across Africa, even the most developed countries, is lack of investment from the government to invest in research. And research is the bridge that takes the continent and shares that information with the rest of the world. So often when people ask me, “What’s a Somalilander?” They always say, “We’re interested, but we know nothing.” And I always say, me too, I just know my lived experiences, but there’s not a book that I could recommend or something strong. Do you see any future for Somaliland investing in its own research? Because with all this wisdom you share today, or lessons, we have to put that into writing, for a book for the world to read.

Bashir Goth: That’s actually an advice that I always give to Somaliland universities when I meet them. Whenever I go back to the country and I meet them, I always tell them research, research, research. Because a university without research will not benefit the community in which they exist. Because they have to look at the community, look at the problems with the community, and they have to make research about it. Governments rely on universities for their policies. For some, like your school here, probably you produce so many papers on different policies of the United States. So this probably would be taken by the Congress or by politicians, and then they implement it. And that that’s very important. Whether it’s science, whether it’s political science, whether it’s art, everything.

Bashir Goth: So we are very weak in research. We have to build our research capabilities. We have to find funding. Public funding would be the best, because when you have private funding, then there will be an interest in that. But also, private funding will come on board. So I know for example now the universities of Amoud and Hargeisa, actually they started their own research departments, and they have went through a lot of training, and they’re doing good work now, but it will take some time until they pick up. I think Amoud and Hargeisa, both of them now produce some kind of journals, research journals where they publish their papers, and I hope that increases also. It will come.

Bashir Goth: But that’s actually what… Not only Somaliland but all Africa suffers from that. And I was actually thinking, probably Africa has to create their own research or scientific journals. Because if the best African paper comes out from any university in Africa, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to publish in one of these scientific or academic journals in the Western world, because they have their own… It’s like clubs. So you have to be a certain race, you have to be certain something. You know, you guys. Otherwise, you cannot publish it. I have read a story where two actual researchers, they were Europeans, made research about that, and they couldn’t publish their papers. Then they took the names of famous, well-known academics, scholars, and they sent their papers with the name of these scholars, and they were published. Same papers. So, there is a racism and discrimination also in academic journals in the world. So probably it’s time that Africa, Latin America, whoever, have to create their own.

Joshua Charles: That would certainly change the tides of the academic space, especially how people from abroad, they often come to America, go to Europe, to advance their education, to get master’s degrees, PhDs, LLMs. But if there are some opportunities within Africa to contribute to the academic space in a meaningful way, in lieu of taking a trip outside of the continent, then I think there would be a lot of incentive from citizens from Somaliland, as well as from other citizens across the continent.

Joshua Charles: So just thinking about… Shifting gears a bit to the Central Bank. Infrastructure development… it sounds like there is tremendous potential for infrastructure development, and there are currently a lot of large projects in place that are scheduled to be done in the next year. Political stability is crucial to seeing the completion of these projects, as well as in the case of force majeure, say war or something like that, it’s crucial that infrastructure projects have a way to cross the finish line. So just thinking about the role of the central bank, what are some strategies in place that can be employed to actualize some of these infrastructure projects that are on the to-do list? And in what ways can these projects be employed that appeals to stakeholders like America, continued support from the UK, from UAE?

Bashir Goth: Actually, we have a central bank, but the Central Bank doesn’t have any role or have oversight on projects. They control the financial system of the country, for example. They looked at the country’s inflation, they have to control the inflation. They have to control the currency and the rate of the currency. They have the money of the state. They can give loans to the state or even private sector who wants that. And that’s their role as a central bank, like any other bank in the world does. But the oversight of projects and infrastructure and all these things have other departments, whether it’s ministries or independent departments, there are departments who are looking on that.

Deqa Aden: Mm-hmm. And now I’m going to ask you the last question. I think it seems like Somaliland is a really young country, and the current leadership and the previous one, you guys have sacrificed a lot to sustain the way it is right now. It’s a hypothetical question. If Somaliland was the most developed country in the world and you didn’t have to sacrifice anything, what path of career you would have chosen for yourself? And what would Ambassador Bashir would have been, if Somaliland was the most developed country?

Bashir Goth: Professor.

Deqa Aden: Professor?

Bashir Goth: Of a university. Especially on literature and probably international relations, but mostly on literature. Because that’s my…

Deqa Aden: Your passion.

Bashir Goth: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was my actual ambition when I was a student. But then when I finished university in Somalia and I left the country and I went to the Middle East and I was on my way to the United States, my father got sick. And I was the eldest of the family. All my brothers and sister were in the middle of school, and who would take care of them? That’s why I just started to work. But my intention was to be a professor. I was a good student. So that was my… But I did not stop. I’m a lifelong learner. So I don’t have the title, but I do a lot of things, so I don’t regret that.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Bashir Goth. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our interviewers, Deqa Aden and Joshua Charles. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute’s research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Episode: Gender and Conflict

featuring

Lina Haddad Kreidie, political psychologist and academic director of gender studies at the Lebanese American University

interviewed by

Hannah Balikci and Zareen Hussain, Pearson Fellows

Thursday October 13, 2022

Full Transcript

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you’ll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

How do war and displacement disproportionately impact women? In this episode, we speak with

Dr. Lina Haddad Kreidie, a political psychologist and academic director of gender studies at the Lebanese American University. Her research centers marginalized communities, mainly displaced and refugee women in the Middle East. We discuss her work with the Intisar Foundation, studying drama therapy as a mental health intervention for refugee women and how it’s impacted communities within the camps.

Zareen Hussein:

Hello, my name is Zareen Hussein. I am a second-year public policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Hannah Balikci: And I am Hannah Balikci. I’m a first-year student at the Harris School of Public Policy.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: My name is Lina Haddad Kreidie and I am the academic director of Gender Studies at the Lebanese American University. And I am a research consultant for an NGO for the Intisar foundation. Intisar Foundation works with women empowerment for socioeconomically disadvantaged women who are impacted by war and violence.

Zareen Hussein: Could you tell us how you came to your work? What brought you to this intersection between gender, mental health, and conflict?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Just to rewind a bit, my degree is in political science, and I did a concentration in political psychology. So my gender focus and work on women came as a result, what we call experiential learning. And based on my own experiences and my own observations and analysis of the different theories and readings I went through. I found that women are invisible, mainly in the political field. And even when they are in, they are subordinated, they are used as tokens and not as effective decision makers.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So this brought me to try to explore more on the causes and the barriers that lead to such gender discrimination. I also wanted to see this in different cultures. So I’ve read a lot about gender inequality in the western world, but it was not enough explanatory basis to understand the gender inequalities in the Arab world. And my work now, I moved from University of California Irvine to Lebanon to do the work on conflict management and to teach in political science. But I wanted to base my research on gender, starting with women. But with my new position, I’m expanding to look at all marginalized communities and intersectional inequalities where we use race, ethnicity, class, disabilities, and women and men, because gender is not only about women. So this is where my research is landing now, and my academic and intellectual work is at the University. My teaching and the student-based learning process that’s taking place on campus is also linked to my work with Intisar Foundation and the approach of empowering women.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And I noticed that this drama therapy intervention, which I was suspicious at the beginning, of its effectiveness, is an excellent and effective approach that brings in not only psychoanalysis, which I’ve read a lot about, and cognitive behavioral therapy and EDMR and all those individual approaches to helping people with psychological issues and specifically people who are impacted by compounded traumas.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In cultures where psychological counseling is considered a stigma and where women are, and men, usually don’t see psychologists or psychiatrists because they would be stigmatized as crazy, and men would with their hyper masculinity, “No, I’m not crazy,” And women would be afraid to do so. And in academia also I noticed that even in my promotions and academic life, because I got married young and I had children, I would see myself and all the women around me as delayed in their progress. This is at the workplace sector.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In the humanitarian field, I noticed that women are prominent and specifically in Lebanon where CSOs and the NGOs took the place of the government in terms of providing services. And it was usually women who started and founded and are active in such NGOs. So I noticed that there is a parallel of the role of women where in some sectors they are subordinated, they’re weak, but they are given the care, which is also the associated role that was subscribed to them since birth. Women are the caring, men are the providers. So yes, this is what’s happening, this dualism in functions in Lebanon where the NGOs are run by women, they are the ones who keep the social fabric of the society in a country that is broken by divisiveness.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So not to expand too much on this but to focus on mainly marginalized communities, which is a subject you are interested in, the Intisar foundation is the field work where I felt myself, I’m not only needing analyzing and writing policy recommendations based on synthesizing literature, but also I am doing it in the field. This is what really brought me to Intisar Foundation and this work.

Hannah Balikci: How did you first get involved with the Intisar Foundation?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It was in a meeting at the Lebanese American University. Actually, my husband, who’s a neurologist and a psychiatrist, met with the CEO of the foundation and they were talking about their work to him because he’s a neurologist, and he said, “No, no, my wife is best, she’s a political psychologist, she’s interested in women empowerment and she keeps talking about gender issues,” so here comes the man. He said, “This is women empowerment, this is not my job,” although they wanted to recruit him. So he referred them to me and this is where we found each other, actually. And it was the best time where I could translate my work on the ground. And I met Sheikha Intisar AlSabah, who is the founder. She’s from the royal family of Kuwait. And one would think that they are not involved with the people, but she’s very much involved with the people. And for children we manage bullying, but for women it’s the drama therapy intervention.

Zareen Hussein: Before we get into understanding what drama therapy is, can you help, for those who don’t know, what is political psychology?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Excellent. Political psychology is a field that focuses on the micro level of analysis When we are analyzing any issue, whether it’s electoral issue, electoral campaign, leadership, decision making at the level of the government, the behavior of individuals and groups, political psychology explains the why question. Meaning, for example, to explain terrorism, we don’t judge, we explain why those groups chose to do this. So we look at the emotions, we look at the psychology of fear, we look at identity politics, we look at the cognitive behavioral aspects in the sense of the group-think aspect, the conformity aspect, what we consider as cognitive dissonance, meaning we have mental schemas, we have norms. So when something happens that contradicts our mental schema, we give it the deaf ear and the blind eye. And how we build empathy and altruism, and all those factors are part of explaining conflicts and other issues pertaining to human interaction.

Zareen Hussein: And that’s really interesting because, for example, when talking about ISIS, the uninformed thought is that it’s just extremists joining an extremist group where there’s a lot more caveats to that.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Zareen Hussein: So Dr. Lina, could you give us an example on everything you’ve just said, maybe in Lebanon or with ISIS specifically?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: You know, I will start with my own. As I mentioned, everything comes with experience. When I was in Lebanon in the ‘80s, I saw around us that religiosity has been increasing, and there is a resurgence of Islamist groups, Muslim Brotherhood and others. And women who did not wear any covers, we started seeing more women with cover. I said, “What’s happening? Why is this happening?” And then there was the political tension between the US and certain groups in Lebanon, and we started seeing hostages taken.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And at every corner of the road, it’s the Islamists. It’s the Islamists who are doing the harm and so on. And I believe this because we saw that there is this. And Libya came to train certain Islamist groups. Iran came to train other Islamist groups, and the whole region was involved in Lebanon. And this is during the Civil War. So I wanted to do this study, but I could not because of the threats the professors had from Islamist groups. The professor I was working with was a British guy: he was kidnapped in Lebanon, and I thought it was because of the study he was helping me with, and it was not.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So I had the question of why blame Islamist groups? So to make the story short, to understand I wanted to look at the economic, the political situation. I could not find the right answer. It was always insufficient. So I thought into that. I went into the individual level of analysis, to understand the difference between how they view the world versus how the West views the world. For example, what does terrorism mean to them? What does self-sacrifice, a freedom fighter versus terrorist? What does democracy mean to them? Because we’ve learned that there is no democracy in Islam, but they do have an understanding of democracy completely different. They base it on justice, while in the US we base it on individual freedoms. So there are different understandings. So this was based on my political psychology background.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: For the ISIS situation, also the concept of yes, there are Islamist groups who are using Islam as a political tool, and they are vulnerable because of the marginalization they lived in. So whether they are men and women, who lately started joining ISIS, because we have these misperceptions that only men do that, but also women, yes with a lesser number, because they felt they were marginalized in their communities and they found an answer in this ideological, religious, emotional attachment. This could be an example, but the Palestinian camps and the Syrian camps are hubs of extremism. So when you have extreme poverty, marginalization, certain perceptions of people as being prone to being terrorists. So when you give them a certain role, they become the role, and it becomes them. So political psychology helps us understand how to explain, so we can solve the problem better. That’s the idea behind political psychology.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In addition to, we did analysis of the Gulf War. And how a country like the US where we have leaders who are in power and they are supposedly intellectuals and the best in making decisions, they come up with defective decision making and it’s based on certain phenomenon that’s called groupthink. When you are working in a group and you want to belong into the group, even if they’re making a bad decision, the misperceptions of the situation, the in-group, out-group, “I love my in-group, I hate the other group.” So you tend to make defective decision makings and personalities and the right-wing authoritarianism and all of this.

Zareen Hussein: So definitely an us-versus-them mentality?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It is the us-versus-them mentality.

Hannah Balikci: In regards to what you were mentioning about refugee camps, we know that women and children make up over half of all refugees, internally displaced and stateless people. Why is bringing a gender perspective to conflict and displacement important in the context of refugees, and what happens when it’s not taken into account?

Zareen Hussein: And also definitely in political psychology, why are the women not in that discourse?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Men usually are the ones in the war. So when there is displacement and forced migration, the majority are women who leave. And during that time women are disproportionately impacted because they are the ones who take care of the house. They are the ones who take care of the children. So when their husbands are not around, they have a double burden. They have to provide, and they have to care. So it’s both jobs are done on them.

Zareen Hussein: So it’s a shift in the gender roles, almost.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. There’s a shift. So this is one. On the other hand, if men are also with the woman in the house, and she’s not a single mom, as we mentioned, his role becomes less because humanitarian agencies with their mindset that we have to help the women. So it’s not the right approach because when you give the woman, I remember from my work in Jordan with refugees, the woman would get the 20 dinar to spend, and the male is sitting at home and he feels “What happened to my role? I am the man of the house.”

Zareen Hussein: Demasculinization.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. Demasculation. And his hyper-masculinity gets attacked and hurt, and this is where the toxic masculinity starts to work and he transfers it on his wife and children, mainly girls. And this is where domestic violence rises at times of crisis. So there is a need to definitely support men and women, but more so women because they are disproportionally impacted, and they are the backbone of the family.

They do both jobs when needed. They do revert to informal jobs, and they don’t ask for much, which is something that’s not good. Because they are used to, “I have to do it. I am the mother, I sacrifice.” Most of their work is unpaid, but they try to do everything when they need to. So it becomes their motherly work and their informal work where they get paid less. So they tend to be the ones hired more than men, but this adds to their trauma, this adds to their bad relationship at home with their husbands and brothers.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there is a need, and supporting women meaning supporting the family and supporting the community. And I believe, if the mother is able to listen to her husband, not in the sense of being obedient, in the sense of understanding the background of his violence and being able to communicate with him better and not accepting what he does by being more self-confident, by reporting if she has violence, if there’s any violent attacks against her.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Because usually woman in those communities tend to be afraid of reporting because this might increase their violence. So with the drama therapy we do, we help them report. So it is important to make those communities more peaceful, to reduce the vulnerability to extremism so their children would learn from them the significance of communication, the significance of speaking up, the significance of finding other ways of expressing their anger. It doesn’t have to be transferring it on other people and so on. So yeah, that’s mainly some of the factors that are helpful.

Hannah Balikci: Great. You’ve said previously that women who have experienced trauma, such as war and displacement, usually don’t seek help because of their inability to know that they need help. What are the consequences, like you were just mentioning about the effects on their children, what are the consequences of not taking this trauma and how it impacts people into consideration?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: I think it is very important. First, to bring awareness to all, and more so to women because women are suppressed and, as I mentioned, they don’t report their situation. They feel that they are responsible, and they have to take it in: “I’m not going to get angry at my husband or report because I have to keep the peace in the house.” But they are actually destroying themselves from within. So they need to be become more aware of the need for psychological help. And this is something that needs to be done via NGOs or even for girls at school to start with this. So as this will bring more awareness and then the way they raise their children, the way they speak to their husbands and to their community, would be more effective. Just if you want to repeat the question because I think I missed an aspect of it.

Hannah Balikci: What are the consequences of not taking this trauma, and how it impacts people, into consideration?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: If you don’t treat psychological illnesses, they could become more physiologically destructive. Meaning, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder, the more it becomes severe, the more it impacts the brain, it affects the memory, it affects the emotions, they become more angry because of the low impulse control, they tend to be aggressive. I did a study on the link between post-traumatic stress disorder and violence, and there was a significant correlation between PTSD and aggression because people tend to react with anger and they regret it after, but they keep repeating it and they know that they did something wrong, but they cannot control their emotions. So imagine a community where, like among Syrians, every three Syrians in Lebanon, one has PTSD. Every four, one has generalized anxiety.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So if you have a community with all those psychological disorders, then you have a tendency for more violence. I know there are many studies on the macro level that blame Islam or blame the culture or blame economic situation. Yes, these could be factors, but if you have a healthy mental health or a healthy psychology, then you don’t have any psychological disorders, then you can manage the situation better. You can manage your poverty better, you can manage marginalization. We all, as women, we go through this. If we have the ability to deal with it in a healthier way, then we reduce use the problems of... There are many studies done in the US on the veterans with PTSD when they come back from war, and we have higher rates of suicide, we have high rates of domestic violence, specifically because the government is not spending enough to support them.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Imagine in countries like Lebanon or Syria or Iraq or Yemen where the government is lacking and they’re not providing. If NGOs are not active, or any institution, in helping such communities, then we are leading those countries into disasters. So yes, mental health is very important. I think reconstruction of zones of conflict or when you want to build peace, you cannot have peace if the levels of psychological traumas or compound traumas are not relieved, then we don’t build highways if we don’t have people that are productive and healthy.

Zareen Hussein: Absolutely. And I think using the US veterans example is perfect because I know our conversation is about women and how they respond to the lack of resources while also experiencing PTSD, like you said, there’s violence, domestic violence. But imagine on the flip side, men who are also in this exact same situation. There’s an immense high rate of suicide amongst US veterans, and they’re going through the similar things: PTSD, lack of resources. So it’s almost not even a binary gender situation, it’s just a humanitarian issue, but we’re addressing it through a gendered lens.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly.

Hannah Balikci: Would you say that the PTSD levels of refugees in camps is a factor in terms of the gender-based violence that is... We know that gender-based violence surged during COVID-19 as a shadow pandemic, and it’s also very prevalent within refugee camps in general. Is the factor of PTSD amongst the camps, do you think, related to the increase in gender-based violence in refugee camps?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: There’s a variable, or a confounding variable. For the patriarchic system and the masculinity factor, it becomes toxic at times of crisis. Refugees live in crisis. When they live in a camp, it’s a crisis situation. And when males are unable to provide, so their masculinity factor impacts their relationship with their wives, and even boys who are seen as lesser than them. So definitely the gender factor, the patriarchal system. But then PTSD is an added factor because they have low impulse control, they have been going through trauma. And the trauma, it could be war and violence, but it could be also their inability to meet the masculinity expectations. So this is an added trauma for men, which I think should be also resolved.

Zareen Hussein: And Hannah, just going off of what you asked, I can also see how those suffering from PTSD in these camps are attracted to extremism. Because like you said, they’re demasculinized, they have these violent tendencies. And I’m talking about both men and women in this situation because a lot of women, young women, joined ISIS.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah, I agree 100%. And there are other psychological disorders, but there are studies that have proven that there is a link between PTSD and violence because of the low impulse control, and it depends on the level of PTSD, the severe ones versus mild or moderate ones. So yes, it is a factor.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, we’ve been talking a lot about what happens when there’s a lack of resources. You, alongside the Intisar Foundation, you work a lot on drama therapy as a, not necessarily alternative to CBT or EMDR but a…

Lina Haddad Kreidie: An intervention, a group therapy intervention versus an individual-based intervention. Definitely, psychoanalysis or the couch psychoanalysis or the CBT or the EDMR can help. Some of them, they have to be within a short period of time. For example, with PTSD, if you don’t really treat the person who witnessed aggression or who suffers from drama within a certain period of time, it’s helpless. It does not help, psychoanalysis or CBT.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Drama therapy applies also for people where the witnessing of the event passed for some time, so it has an added value. And it is group therapy, which is one of the criteria also from reading the VA history, that social cohesion, social support, is very important. In the US, we know that they talk about it in the family, it’s well reported, but in refugee camps they keep it a secret, they don’t even know about it. So when they are suffering from a problem and they go to an NGO for help, they start becoming aware. They tell them, “Oh, you need counseling,” or “You have depression,” or “You could have the PTSD.” And definitely the diagnosis is built only on clinical and not the other factors. So when we are using drama therapy, we are basing it on clinical analysis done by other NGOs and psychiatrists and psychologists. So it’s an intervention approach that has its own value on its own, because it can happen after a long period of time. It doesn’t have to be within this short period after the event itself.

Hannah Balikci: And I think it’s an interesting point you’ve made about drama therapy and the group aspect of it. How has it made an impact within the refugee communities you worked in and how do you evaluate? If you’re taking into drama therapy, how do you evaluate the pre and post impacts of it within the communities that you’ve worked in?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Drama therapy in itself is a very intensive program and the main purpose of this is to improve emotional awareness and self-awareness, to create a sense of belonging. Something that refugees, men and women, in our case, the women, have an identity crisis. In Lebanon, specifically, they are displaced. They’re considered internally displaced because Lebanon is not a signatory to the refugee situation, and Lebanon and Syria have a kind of relationship of less borders. They go into this dilemma, so they needed a sense of belonging, and drama therapy tackles negative psychological symptoms, focusing on providing structured and sequential mental health intervention.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And there is a five-phase model, the way we do the drama therapy. The first phase... Do you want me to explain? Okay, the first phase, which is a dramatic play. It allows the group to develop a rapport and to build trust among each other and the facilitator. We have a drama therapist. The same one goes for the 12 sessions because they build trust with the woman. During this phase, what happens is name games. They get to know each other, and they would say, “What do you want to call yourself?” So they give, other than the real name, how they see themselves. And then we try to bring the women—first, there’s an individual meeting and then group meeting with everyone. And this game encourages participants to gradually build towards personal disclosure as they see and hear others in the group sharing their life details. There is one of the games that’s called image, where smaller subgroups are tasked with using their bodies and working together to create a still image that presents a certain concept.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: For example, I mentioned the example of four, and they would do the image and they would stand still. And you would be the ones watching me, then you would imitate me. And there is a group who’s not seeing but from what they are feeling, then they would do the same thing just from what they heard. And this is—we kind of train the memory from just using their sensories, like their hearing sense. And “What do you think?” So they would stand up and try to imagine what the people were doing, the other women were doing.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So it’s a game of senses, the vision, the listening, and then trying to revive their memories and to use their collective memories in explaining what certain concepts mean, what certain situations mean. For example, we show them a picture of people moving as refugees from, let’s say, from Ukraine, not the Syrian, and how would they see this? Do they see it as similar to their situation or is it different? So it’s bringing the reality on the stage and how they respond to it. So this is the first phase. The second is the scene work where we use games to introduce the participants to theater techniques that help them better manage and understand their emotions. To express yourself, how can you do it better? How can you manage your emotions? How you can explore yourself when I say anger, when I say being happy, all those terms, how do you express it? Then we do certain forms of meditation and the breathing exercises, certain physical relaxation exercises.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Then comes the third phase, which is the role play, which encourages the use of imagination to distance oneself from their own issues, to gain a different perspective, play the role of someone else, and then to build more group solidarity and sense of community. And here comes also guided meditation is used to encourage the participants to discover areas of themselves that they do not speak about or acknowledge openly. And here we have more advanced games like the life map, typically used where one participant uses the space within the room to map out her life in a monologue style, highlighting the life-defining events that she experienced. This exercise is performed while the rest of the group seated in an audience formation as witnesses, which introduces the participant to the idea of exposing more personal aspects of her life to others, so this kind of exercise. The fourth phase, which is culminating enactments, uses previously developed skills such as personal insight, memory, recollection, and trust in the group to give the participant a safe space to openly express their personal issues and experiences. And this is where the play comes and how they act their experiences.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Which takes us to that dramatic ritual, either by singing… There is Fairuz, in Lebanon, a very well-known singer, and her songs come from themes. So we use the theme of her song, and we give them different songs and then we ask them, “Which one would you choose?” And interesting that they choose the ones that after we have looked at them and analyzed, we think that this is the song that would fit or this kind of group game that would fit, and they would choose the same one. So after this song time then we kind of create a play or a collection of vignettes.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, I think it’s really interesting that you bring up Fairuz, who is such a famous singer in the Middle East and originally from Beirut. Which leads me to ask, when you’re doing drama therapy in the five phases, how important is it to consider cultural context and cultural nuances? Because in America, mental health is getting more and more recognized day by day, but still a long way to go, whereas in some countries it’s nonexistent. So using Lebanon as an example, can you talk to us more about the controlled context that’s considered while treating people with drama therapy?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes, I think this is very important. Drama therapists that do the work are trained using books that come from the western world so-

Zareen Hussein: In Western, in America?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: American, European. There are more European works on drama therapy and art therapy. So this is one aspect of it. Then they have to take this and customize it to really the fit the group of women they are helping. And believe it or not, it’s not only about the Arab culture or the Islamic culture or the patriarchic system in that part of the world, although there is this big umbrella of such a culture. But doing drama therapy in Chatila camp is different than doing drama therapy in the north in Tripoli, in Akkar, or doing drama therapy in a town in the mountains.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: They have based on different religious backgrounds and sectarian backgrounds and ethnic backgrounds and different socioeconomic needs. So we customize to that level and this customization does not happen before, it happens after we meet the woman. We do the biographic background and listen a bit to them. And of course, the drama therapists who are doing the work are from Lebanon and they know the cultures and they work in theaters and they do playbacks. They are highly involved in aspects of coexistence and helping resolve conflicts, so they are experts on this. So yes, definitely, the cultural nuances are very important. We cannot parachute norms, values, ways of dealing with people.

Hannah Balikci: Going through the different cultural differences within Lebanon itself points us to the fact that Lebanon currently hosts the largest number of refugees per capita and per square kilometer in the world, currently estimated at 1.5 million Syrian refugees and around 300,000 Palestinian refugees, if I’m correct. Do you have any insights, or I think, could you go through just the general background of the camp that you were working in with drama therapy and the different populations you were working with and similarly to the cultural questions, how the camps…

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Culture?

Hannah Balikci: Yeah. Could you go through how, within the camps, the cultures of the different communities that are living there coexist and how drama therapy has impacted the communities?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: I think this is an excellent question. I mentioned that there are different ethnographic cultural differences within Lebanon, based on the geographical location, based on the class level or sectarian or religious background. The camp is a small area, let’s say Chatila camp, because we did another camp. Chatila camp hosts Syrian, Palestinian refugees. Palestinian refugees are as old as 1948. Syrian refugees started to come to Lebanon in 2012. And Lebanese who are below subsistence level, who have no ability to rent or buy outside the camp, and they usually go and live anywhere. It’s not that you have to pay. In addition, all those who are running from justice or criminals who hide in the camp because they get the protection there. Nobody would come, the police, no one will go in to take them. So it’s not secure place. But all those challenges, all those, I would say traumas, live together in this community. So how to deal with that culture.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: The first study we did, we on purpose chose only Syrian refugees. Then in the second group we have second Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese women. The first phase when we met them individually, they would talk about their life, their situation in the camp and each would blame the other. So they were blaming each other. “They took my space and this is where we live…” The Palestinians talking about the Syrians and the Syrians saying that the Palestinians hate us and then the Lebanese say, “This is our land.” All of this was happening.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So the challenge was putting them together and creating a common space for people of different perceptions, different fears. They have traumas, violence, displacement, etc., etc. But they all have comparing themselves to the outside world in the sense of outside the camp. So we started telling them, “You have similar situation.” And then we would shed light on their humanity and on their needs. So we bring them together on that factor and then they start feeling comfortable and this becomes a safe space. And at some point, we allow them to tell the other why they hate them, to speak openly about that, and this creates tension. But then they started laughing at this situation. “How come we all have the same problems? You have the same problems with kids. I have the same problems with my husband and with the Lebanese people,” and so on. So they started taking it with more manageable way, and it created friendships and trust. And this is where we would like to follow up on this later on after we finish the sessions. We don’t want this to be stopped there.

Hannah Balikci: Great. It sounds very cathartic, especially for women. It’s like going through, as you were going through with the five phases, women unpacking trauma, especially older women have more trauma, we know.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Hannah Balikci: Did you find that between the ages of the women that you were working with that it was more impactful for, say, older women versus younger women or the ranges that you were working with?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: In the first two studies, we noticed, based on observation, that young women tend to be easier and faster in responding to our goals. However, the study that we are doing now to compare different groups and to compare different age groups to see the significance of the change pre and post the therapy. Sometimes young people can make it a fun thing and dancing and playing games and maybe at the end the impact is not that high. But while older women, when they are so impacted, a 20% change might be a relief, might be a positive, might be more significant. So this is the psychometric analysis we’re doing now to see the pre and post change, based on the age and different demographics.

Zareen Hussein: Dr. Lina, this week you’re at University of Chicago as part of the Pearson Global Forum, a day-long conference at the university on discrimination and marginalization. You’re speaking on a panel focused on the past few years, addressing the crisis that is going on in Lebanon. Firstly, could you give us some contextual information? So for those who don’t know, what has been happening in Lebanon over the past years, and then what are you going to be speaking at the Pearson Forum?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Lebanon, you said the past few years, but I could go back to the days of the inception of what’s called the Nation State of Lebanon. Since its inception in 1943, Lebanon was created on the wrong foot, meaning the different religious groups were not taken into consideration in a way where they would come together as a nation. And it was done by the French for Lebanon. So the Lebanese elites and the Lebanese people were not involved in the Sykes-Picot agreement, and they did not sit at the table. It was decided upon them, with the context that we need to protect the Christians in Lebanon because the Christians in Lebanon represent the Eastern Christians and Lebanon is the symbol for that.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And the Maronites were good collaborators with the French, so give them some benefits, while the rest would be added to the system. So by having such a confessional start, they called it consociational democracy. They thought we are in Belgium, but it’s not because it only divided the political representation and among the elites of the Lebanese, so the elite Maronites, elite Sunni, elite Shia, elite Roman Orthodox, the Jews. So it did not take into consideration how this could circle from the top elite to the people.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And so the elites took over in building the relationship with the people. So the relationship was the clientele system. Each felt that there’s a threat from the other sect. So they need to collaborate to create an equation where they politically can work together. And they all had, they were on the verge of “If I don’t protect my sect…,” but actually they were protecting their own self-interest to stay in power, “then someone will take over.”

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So this inequality between the different sects, mainly between, let’s say, all Muslims and all Christians, was more obvious when the Palestinians came to Lebanon and they were allowed in to form a military movement, with the Arabs accepting this, with the Americans and the Europeans saying okay, not explicitly saying but implicit, by not saying no. So the Palestinians formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon, and they started their mission of fighting Israel from Lebanon. At the same time, the Lebanese government did not give the Palestinians who came to Lebanon their rights as human beings. They only dealt with them as refugees who have a cause for right of return.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So if you give them citizenship, if you give them work permits, if you give them all those aspects, they wouldn’t go back. So this will take away from the cause. This led to marginalization. This is the Palestinians. It led to the Civil War. This is a factor. The inequality between the different Lebanese sects, the poverty, the elites were in power were rich, the rest were poor. So we have a recipe of a civil war, and this is what happened during the Civil War. So when the Civil War ended, to solve this problem, they managed this problem by keeping the same war lords in power and creating a new agreement called the Taif Accord, which they said, “Equal representation between the different sects in the government,” but the president is Maronite, the prime minister is Sunni, the Speaker of the House is Shia, so a confessional system… saying in the Taif Accord, “But we need to abolish the confessional system, gradually.”

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Never happened, because managing the problem with the same people who were the warlords stayed in power. They have no interest in changing the system that makes them superior to the people under them, the constituencies. “I’m protecting our sect.” You know, now every time a politician is blamed of corruption, if he’s Maronite, the patriarch will come out say, “He’s a red light. You cannot touch this person.” If he’s as Sunni, the Grand Mufti of the Sunnis will say, “No, this is our…” So you cannot reach them because of the fear aspect that’s present and the people would come and stand by them because—

Zareen Hussein: Tribalism, almost.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly, it’s like tribalism, but based on this confessional sectarian fear. This is where political psychology comes. So every time the problem is managed, it’s managed in a wrong way, by keeping the confessional system, by maintaining the corruption system where the elites use their dirty games by saying, “I’m helping my community,” but at the same time, they’re actually stealing the money. They’re using victimization and fear to promote their own interests rather than the public interest. Same applies for those political elite, they not only rule in the public space, but they also own banks. They have shares in the banks, they have shares in every big business where the public benefits from. Because in Lebanon the electricity is public, the water provision is public. There’s a social security system, of course, that is definitely government. But this social security system is also very discriminatory because you only provide social security to people who are employed. So I am employed, I pay, I get social security.

Zareen Hussein: And I imagine that excludes the refugees.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly. It excludes refugees, it excludes people who work in private businesses. Because of that corruption, there is avoidance of paying taxes, so you don’t pay social security. And if I have a private business, I hire people for three months, I fire them, I rehire them, so I don’t pay social security fees. See? So there is this culture of corruption that’s adding to marginalization and to setting the foundation of conflict and instability and fragility of the government and the country.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So even when Rafic Hariri, late prime minister, came to Lebanon to save Lebanon, to reconstruct Lebanon, also he reconstructed Lebanon on a wrong basis because he turned Lebanon into a corporation. Many people owned property in the downtown area that was completely destroyed during the war. And he built a beautiful facade, beautiful buildings, and roads, but the Lebanese people cannot afford to live there anymore and to even go to a restaurant there. So it’s not for the Lebanese, it’s  for the image of Rafic Hariri and the elite in Lebanon. And it was mainly personified in him and in his entourage. So some actually called his work as effective corruption, which is still, but you’re feeding the people at the same time. It’s not Robin Hood because he made so much money out of—

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah, he just made so much money out of it. And that, the Lebanese government, 100 times more than it used to be before.

Zareen Hussein: It’s almost as if the twisted assumption of what people think socialism is.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Exactly.

Hannah Balikci: Given the current situation in Lebanon, we also wanted to give you the chance to share briefly about both your fears and hopes for the country. What is the biggest challenge and fear at this point, and what is your biggest hope?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Okay. Definitely, Lebanon is in almost a failed state. The only foundation that’s kept in Lebanon is the military. Lebanon was based on the banking sector, the tourism sector, the health sector, the educational sector. The educational sector is losing a lot. The banking sector is down. The health system is unable to provide for the people, only the military. So there is hope in keeping the military standing, although there is a lot of dissatisfaction among the soldiers and the people in the military because their salaries, if they used to get paid five million, five million was around $3,000. Now it’s $125. And the prices in Lebanon are international because we are not a country of industry. We are a country of services. And if you don’t produce, you buy everything. We import most of the products, so they are poor.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: There are some external supports. The US supports them, literally just to keep them standing. So we need to build on this. But at the same time, the banking sector, the IMF is highly involved in putting conditions on the same political elite to reform the country before any loan can be given to the country. And I have a problem with those two. First, the political elite have no interest in reforming something that threatens their power. Two, I have no hope that a new liberal system that takes away the support of the government and by making people pay more taxes to be able to pay back the loans will really help.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Because we have many examples of where the IMF came up with solutions for underdeveloped countries or countries in conflicts that really flourished. So actually, it maintains the status quo of poverty and just live and let others live in a way, just barely minimal. I have hope in the Lebanese people that are trying to manage their everyday life. I know that everyone… there is a few who have abilities, who have the fresh, what we call the fresh dollar, the money that comes from abroad versus the dollars that were put in the banks before 2019 and are stuck in the banks, because the banks loaned them to the government, the government went bankrupt, so there’s no money to give back to the people.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there is a bubble. There’s something happening on the bottom of the country where people are managing their situation. So what they need is external support, not the way it’s being conditioned. Because even with their power to adapt and build, they still live in this culture of corruption. So they’re survival of the fittest. It’s the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. This is what’s happening in Lebanon. So to create a new system where what people are doing becomes institutionalized in good governance.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: We need new policies, we need new political establishment to say, call it establishment. We had hope in the 2022 elections to have a change. But it seems that the fear of each other made many of the people who went to the revolution… we thought that this would be the change. And it failed drastically with very minimal… I would say changes only from a woman’s perspective. Because women became more seen and their issues became more on the table, to be discussed. They’re still on the menu, but women are not sitting at the table to make decisions.

Zareen Hussein: Not yet.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Not yet. No, not yet. Even now we have many women ran for candidacy, but they did not make it because they need the financial abilities, they need networking and so on. So not to delve into this, there is hope in the people. There is hope in the Lebanese expats. There has been a major exodus of highly educated Lebanese people who still have hope to send back money and help Lebanon. But this is not enough. We need more institutionalization of good governance from the bottom up.

Zareen Hussein: And just a background for American listeners: Dearborn, Michigan is the highest concentration of Lebanese expats and diaspora outside of Lebanon.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes.

Zareen Hussein: So their work connects back to Lebanon country.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes, yes. A lot. Many of the Lebanese, not only in Dearborn. There are 12 million Lebanese expats all over the world. In the US, I don’t know how many, I don’t know the number, but there’s a good number of Lebanese who actually send money to their families. After September 11, this became less so because of the fear of money transfer.

Zareen Hussein: Of course.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: And, “Oh, you’re sending to Lebanon. Who are you sending to?”

Zareen Hussein: Of course.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: So there was those restrictions, but still family support more than big money that’s coming in. But what we need is our projects… first of all to get those political elites in power out. It’s time. It’s time.

Zareen Hussein: It’s time. It’s been 80 years?

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yeah.

Zareen Hussein: It’s time for an overthrow.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: It’s enough. Yeah, exactly. The same warlords, the same families, little change, but still, as if you go into the swamp and you become part of this culture.

Zareen Hussein: Thank you, Dr. Lina.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Thank you.

Zareen Hussein: It’s been insightful, impactful, and as women in the public policy sphere working on conflict and refugees and just two days ago was World Mental Health Day.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Yes. Monday. Yep.

Zareen Hussein: The intersection has been profound. Thank you so much.

Lina Haddad Kreidie: Thank you.

Zareen Hussein: I’m Zareen Hussein.

Hannah Balikci: I’m Hanna Balikci.

Zareen Hussein: And thank you, Dr. Lina Haddad Kreidie.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Lena Haddad Kreidie. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our interviewers, Hannah Balikci and Zareen Hussein. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute’s research and events, visit thePearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy

Podcasts. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and

the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and

practitioners who conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of

the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in

collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research

institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: The following is a PSA from the University of Chicago's Pearson Institute for the

Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, featuring The Pearson Global Forum, an in person and

virtual convening on discrimination and marginalization. Join us to hear from global experts as they

discuss various topics, including the social cost of discrimination, the crisis in Lebanon, and bias in

media coverage of conflict. This event is free and open to all on October 14th. More information at

ThePearsonGlobalForum.org.

Reema Saleh: How does African philosophy shape African political institutions, and how have they

evolved separately from European models of statehood and development? In this episode, we speak

with Dr. Francis Njoku, professor of philosophy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a visiting

scholar at the Harris School. We talk about his research and how homegrown solutions to African

problems can come from within.

Christelle Inema: Hello, my name is Christelle and I'm a first year MPP student at the University of

Chicago. I'm originally from Rwanda, and my policy interests are at the intersection of data analytics,

social equity, and development.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Hello, my name is Francis Njoku, professor of philosophy from the University

of Nigeria, Nsukka. Presently I'm here doing a one-year sabbatical at the Harris School, and it's been

a very great experience.

Christelle Inema: So it's very nice to have you here and to get to interview you as a professor and

also a visiting scholar. So my first question is: you're a visiting scholar with The Pearson Institute.

Can you talk more about your work here at the University of Chicago, like the classes you're

teaching, the research you're doing?

Dr. Francis Njoku: Yeah. When I arrived here in January, so we started a course on African political

economy or political theory. I taught with Professor James Robinson, and it was quite an interesting

course. We were able to discuss part of African philosophy, African political theory and some of

them deal with African existential problems. It was interesting, we were able to interact: it was

audited by a diversity of students, and it was very enriching, I know. So I think so far my experience

has been great, and our research has continued on African themes like religion, politics and race and

African philosophy. Because I've always thought that part of the way to solve an African problem is

to find the elements from within and then address them. It must be a solution from one who's an

insider actually. So that's what the research is going in on looking in Africa, the non-philosophical

purpose of materials in Africa, see how they can indicate towards a way to solve an African

problems, especially sociopolitical problem.

Christelle Inema: Yeah, that's an amazing answer and to that I have a couple follow-up questions.

The first one, what does it mean to examine African philosophy and how do you define it? And then

the second one that actually ties into using African philosophy, in terms of thinking about

development. Why is it important to examine the philosophy underpinning African development,

and how have you done that in your research and your work?

Dr. Francis Njoku: So I don't have to take a [inaudible]. Well, African philosophy is a certain

gateway to human reality. As I start to say that, everyone deserves to know, while you say that, but

to know this or that is a situated experience. So to talk about African philosophy is to take a

standpoint, look at the universal human reality from a particular perspective, because you can't begin

from nowhere, there is no place or position exposition. So if we move from African experience,

African environment and there is the universal human reality, then Africa will make her own specific

contributions, because our people say that the firewood in a place cooks for them. So if you want

homegrown solutions to African problems, it is better to begin from within, to look at African

environment of occurrence and find the instrument for solution and then those same instruments

will cast light on how to understand the universal reality.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So that's why—talking about African philosophy, there are many ways where

people have seen it differently. But just, and I call it an aesthetic viewpoint to understanding, asking

the right questions, taken off from ones point of view and then looking on with the universal

question of knowing, being of knowing reality, no matter the shape reality presents itself. Reality

here, I mean, anything about God, environment, man, human institutions, all this come under the

heading of reality. And to solve the problems… as it faces each particular group, there is an

emphasis to begin from one’s standpoint and then find solutions, instead of waiting for solutions to

be imposed from outside. I'm not saying that when you must have found you have solution within

your own environmental occurrence, that it cannot be generalized, it can. But as a human

standpoint, you have to begin from a specific point to address the issue.

Christelle Inema: Thank you for your responses, and it really, I can relate to that as well, as a fellow

African. So my other question touches on democracy, because you're talking about finding solutions

to African problems from within, from thinking about African philosophy, but the concept of

democracy comes up a lot whenever we talk about development. So why is democracy important to

African countries? And another question is, why is it not important to African countries? Because is

it important? Is there a way to disentangle African democracy from western countries and find a way

to actually build institutions that cater to our needs?

Dr. Francis Njoku: Yeah. Democracy is a form of government, and surely Africans would like that.

But when I talk about homegrown solutions, I think it's better to look at African institutions and

African people, and then see the specific form of government that can be well adapted to it. So we

have this understanding that democracy works everywhere, whatever that means. Even autocratic

governments call themselves democrats, so I don't know what that means. And if you look at history

of sociopolitical theory, not many like democracy. If you go back to Aristotle and Plato, actually

democracy is actually a degeneration of the third best in terms of, I mean, systems of government.

Someone like Plato who think that their best form of government to be a monarchy or aristocracy,

and then you have their degenerations. So the best term from political degeneration started, it gets to

democracy, which is the worst. It's not even the third best, but the degeneration of the third best.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So I'm not saying the democracy, if you, the only thing that salvages democracy

in all these things is a rule of law. The problem with African countries is that people don't obey the

rule of law, if you obey that. But coming down home, my people say that if you know the partridge

egg, you know how to handle it, call it the egg of a dove… first, why do you have to know it? If you

see a set of egg, you know that the egg might resemble that of snake. One is to have the caution to

distinguish snake eggs from the eggs of a dove. If you make that fundamental mistake without

distinguishing well, you are in trouble. The wisdom there is, you need practical reasonable need to

make proper distinctions. Not only will you use that knowledge to identify something, but you need

some practical reasonable needs to know how to handle it.

Dr. Francis Njoku: If you don't know a situation, if you don't know who the African is, it is difficult

to address realities about him, it's difficult to manage him and his affairs. So the first philosophy 101

about the African is to have these two versions. Knowledge of what is doing and practical reasoning

as to how to respond to those problems. Because if this is the egg of the snake, certainly you don't

collect the eggs and put it inside your pocket, already that your knowledge is translated into rules of

action.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So if you look at the African environment, look at the institutions, and then you

can begin to divide a form of government that derives from what people know. I use the e-work

example, our people are very egalitarian, and if you look at available instructible institutions, people

like to come and discuss their problems, instead of waiting for someone to oppose it. Discuss, no

matter your opinion, make your thoughts known, they can agree and disagree. At a point, they have

a consensus, they agree on what to do and everyone works towards that.

Dr. Francis Njoku: That is also a form of democracy, should mean government of the people. But in

actual sense, if democracy is government of the people, this is the initiated democracy from

grassroots level, because people will gather and discuss and take a position on a particular issue.

Unlike modern democracy, where the so-called people who claim to be representatives of the

people, impose it on the people, make laws in their so-called headquarters and then bind them. But

democracy, if one would be serious, the people are sovereign, and this is the sovereign that makes

the laws, as simple as that.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So go back to the roots, the people make the rules, and those guys over there are

their representatives, not the other way around, you make a rule, impose it on people. That is why

consensus democracy you might call it, or what I call initiative democracy, is better than the socalled

representative democracy which we cooperate. And that democracy now has been hijacked by

people with all kind of influences, money and the rest of them. And each year you see a dichotomy

between the people, the so-called sovereign marginalized by their trustees.

Dr. Francis Njoku: If you look at Loc, Loc System will say the people formed a political society, so

the government accounts to them, those they appoint to rule them or to work in government as

trustees. So the agreement was meant, the people made an agreement, not with the government,

they didn't make any pact with the government. They made a pact with themselves and then

appointed trustees to take care of everything. But I don't know whether that is what you see in the

so-called representative democracy. I'm not saying it might work, but it might not work. I'm not

saying that it might work in that place, but if we want to have an African blend, we must pay

attention to this understanding of reality from within, from the grassroots. People initiate political

action and then there it develops to the center. That's the point I'm making.

Christelle Inema: Yeah, and that's perfectly explained, and I truly believe that kind of democracy is

how people can actually gain access to the institutions and define what development also looks like

for them.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Yeah. You see, if you create a social reality through dialogue, construction of

reality and people will see themselves as part of it, it is sustainable. Now from there we can derive a

system of development or government. Now if people come together, make decision, and take a

decision: its Africans are known for making pacts or covenants. They give the roles to themselves,

they agree on something, they have a social pact for it. Everyone knows that, and I used to call it

covenants, a solemn promise made by them by an oath. It doesn't have to have involve blood, but

the important thing is that people come together through their differences, their dialogue. They may

have even enemies before, but important thing now through dialogue, discussions, they're able to

create a central reality and bind themselves to it.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Now if you have this form of thing, if you have this form of this setting, things

come up. Now you begin to have a new reality created that will be a basis for future relationship. If I

make a pact with you, a social pathway agreement, an ethics of encounter will come up. How I now

relate with you in the new dispensation, and also, some system of laws will come up, it's no longer

business as usual. So from there we can make laws about ourselves, about our institutions. We have

ethics of encounter, how we relate to one another, these things they match. And what is very

important, one element that is always there in covenant making in Africa, is what you call the third

person, the witness in a covenant. In marriage ceremonies, in pact between communities, there's

always a witness. Now the witness is not a member of that pact, he's there as a witness, the pact

between those persons. He's there to ensure there is impartiality.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Now if at the end of the day, the covenant runs to into a problem, those who are

involved, the participants will call the attention of the witness, who will come and try to reconcile

them. So the system of covenant has an inbuilt mechanism for taking care of conflict resolution.

They come here because the other man has fallen away from their pact, then you carry on, gone. No,

there are systems, even in marriage, if the union is not working, you report to the parents, if they're

not, the parents will go back through the witness. There are steps, it gives the human that robust

human situation to come back again.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Then another thing, when I propose that theory is, if you have created a reality

where people come together as participant in a covenant… there are two possible systems of

government that can emerge. With a covenant you have created some kind of society, two systems

of government that can emerge. First, I call the first-person perspective. You can elect a member of

the covenant, those participants, one of them to take care of the goods of the members. So if you

know you are organized, you are managing property, a common good you are also a part of. So

there's every indication that you do it as your thing, because you have a share in it, so you are

engaged.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So that's one system. So see a leader as someone who knows your “doing” is part

of the game, is part of that common good, he's sharing in it. So you put everything you have in it.

That's one form of governance. So if our leaders can see themselves, not our people who bought all

kinds of ways and then got there, and they don't talk the public good as they're good, they don't see

themselves as part of the whole, they're there to represent their own interest. That's part of the

problem in Africa.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Another system of government is from what I call the third-person perspective.

This is built on the witness, who is called to be a leader of the covenant group administer the goods

of the covenant. In the 15th-century, Italians had this, they call it the podesta. So the podesta was a

member of another city, for example, maybe someone from Massachusetts, Northern American

maybe, you call him to Chicago to be the mayor, but he was a paid worker. So his job is there to

grant justice and be impartial. He's not part of that covenant, but he's paid to make sure that the

rules are followed and justice also. So if you use this third person perspective, you are invited now,

paid, to administer this set of rules for the people. You are likely to do it well, you are paid, you

don't have any sectarian interest. Basically, you just take the position of the witness, whose position

in the covenant was to maintain justice, to make sure that no side cheats the order.

Christelle Inema: That's a very interesting take, actually, that I hadn't thought about, because usually

we think of leaders as having to be from the communities in order to lead well. But I also think

there is power in having someone from the outside, who actually has no stake in it, who is able to be

impartial. And another thing you touched on that was really interesting, is people coming together to

solve their own problems. And I saw an example of that from Rwanda, where I come from, where

after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, people came together under Gacaca to actually solve the

issues and talk. Do you see it happening elsewhere in Africa? For instance, in Nigeria, there has been

some conflict over the years. Have you seen any indication that that can happen, or what would be

the best way to bring people together when conflicts are still emerging to this day?

Dr. Francis Njoku: See, Nigeria has not faced that. People have been calling for a national

conference, that the constitution being used now is a fraud. Nigeria government doesn't want to

listen, because too many people are benefiting. People want to talk, that's why people, some want to

go, so we cannot be in this union again, there's nothing there for us. Based on discrimination and all

kinds of evils, so let's dissolve it, but Nigerian law doesn't want to do that. But that call, people call

for discussion, it's an African way, at least for discussion. Let's go back to the drawing table to see

what is happening, you know. Look at what happened in there, people came back and discussed,

took on to unbelief, but Nigeria doesn't want to serve them.

Dr. Francis Njoku: What our problem is that this is something from, is not a system that is from our

side. Given our people, the way we behave, the institutions, we can come and discuss and say this is

what we want. We don't need to stay there and let another person to come and do it for us. No, it's

our own problem, we can solve that. And you create a disposition that some of those people already

know. They know what it means to have covenants, and they take it seriously. Those pacts, they take

relationships of in-law, friendship, they take it seriously, and they know when you make a pact with

people, you can collaborate. There's nothing to fear, they're not going to poison you.

Dr. Francis Njoku: The closest you want to come in a covenant relationship is brotherhood. If

someone is abroad, you can't get closer than that, because it is stupefied by the sense of blood,

closeness of familyhood. In Nigeria, we talk about familyhood, everyone's talking about familyhood,

the which man has familyhood, you treat other person as your family. The basis for familyhood is

actually blood. So what they're doing in that covenant situation is a ritual in a very performative

sense, to say that this communion we have shared this closeness we have now: we define it as a

blood closeness. This water we drank individually from the same cup. We have done that as a

member of family, and we hold it that we have shared somehow in that same blood that holds

family together. That's the performance—and since we have said it, committed ourselves, then it is

and then you begin.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So imagine in a country where those diverse persons take themselves as brothers,

they are people that can relate with, you know. It's going to change, but in Nigeria it's not there. No

one has been persecuted in Nigeria for discriminating against another person. Your name says what

you did. In fact, if you mention your name, that you're from Nigeria, if you mention your name, I

can tell you where you're from. Whether you're from south or east to west, which doesn't happen

here. You can answer to Jackson or anything you like, but Nigeria, those names.

Dr. Francis Njoku: And another thing I observed, I said, that's not been strong civil society as a

nation, people saw themselves. I mean, the British came, and they organized a certain society for

their own economic end. So the various people from various tribes came, found themselves together

in the capital, and we are working. But when the white man left, there was nothing to hold them

together. The Yoruba man does not see the Igbo man as his brother, now the Hausa man seeing the

ethnic person as his brother. There was no civil society. The civil society like law will say is an

intermediate group coming out from the state of nature. We are not yet at a political society, but this

is a society of peace. We want to live in peace, even if there is no government, we live in peace to

safeguard our property. So that was not there, because the people don't see themselves as people

who have the same end of security for themselves, there is not. That's why everyone wants to be at

the center, because if you are not there, you are forgotten. All the tribes cannot be at the center at

the same time.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So it goes back to that we lack the civic of political disposition to be a state or a

nation, we have not harnessed that. Even with the present agitation of groups, if you don't develop

the right dispositions, socioeconomic, or moral dispositions, social dispositions, for people to live

together as a people, it wouldn't work. A nation is a choice like a family, you choose the person you

want to marry, you marry, you have kids, have families, families form communities in the nation. It

is a choice. It's part of the principle of human action.

Dr. Francis Njoku: In fact, when [inaudible] was writing about operations of reason, he looked at

human reason at four levels. And he wants to see where he would locate the civil society, the family.

So he said there are four operations of reason. First is the operation of reason in the natural

sciences, who check at the time were called natural science and now maybe physics, chemistry. If

you are studying soil, you're not bringing anything new, you just want to know the contents of this.

That's one operational reason. The second operational is what we bring into our thinking, like logic.

You know, you want to know the correct form or the laws of human reasoning. Now, I'll leave the

third, I'll come back to the third. The fourth one is a level of mechanical sciences where you bring

through your works, you bring an implicit image in something. Like these three, you can use it

instead and cover something and get an image.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Now the third one, which was this major point of his commentary on the

network analytics of Aristotle. He said, this is what we bring in through our deliberations and

choices. And in this third level, he comprehends politics, economic sociology, ethics, and here he

comprehends family, civil society, the state, because these are products of decision. If you want to

marry, you decide. The state is not an act of chance, it's a natural thing. Family is not an act of

chance. And when you bring it about, remember when you are making choices to do human action,

you decide to do it at your end, find a means to realize in it, and then get the right dispositions. If

you're driving to Michigan, and you'll be driving like a mad person, you won't get there. So you need

the required dispositions to actualize your end. So your end is the state. There are dispositions

required of citizens to bring about the good, or reach the end of the state.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Part of the problem of African nations is this inability to train their citizens to

have the right dispositions as it is even as leaders themself, because there are the right dispositions of

leaders. Plato said that the leader is like a ship captain, who's exerts himself driving the ship, the state

to safety. If he doesn't know his way, as if he lacks the proper dispositions, he will ruin himself and

ruin the ship. You see that? So he is not magic. So some Nigerians like to pray, Holy Ghost fire

there, keep… You need appropriate disposition, there is a disposition for being a student, a good

student, you want to have first class. Every day you are sleeping, you're not reading, that is not the

right disposition.

Christelle Inema: Yes, you are right and you talk about a nation is a choice just like a family.

Dr. Francis Njoku: It's a choice.

Christelle Inema: So do you see something or any dispositions that different ethnic groups in Nigeria

have that can potentially bring them together to make that choice?

Dr. Francis Njoku: They have to decide to come together, to work together, to get that themselves

are the same people, that have the right disposition. Not to discriminate on accounting anything, to

stand in for others, to try and to work for common good. You don't just get Abuja if there's no one

there, you take the whole thing. Your job, you only give the people from your own ethnic group.

They are criticizing the vice president of Nigeria who wants to run for the president. That since he's

been there, all the people he's been helping are members of his church. That's not the only thing in

the church in Nigeria. You understand me?

Dr. Francis Njoku: So if every Nigerian stands in for the other, people are not bother. If you are

there, and I know I'm represented. So I don't have to be there, my brother does not have to be

there, everyone is there for everyone else. So we need to cultivate that attitude of one. In fact,

Nigeria, I shall tell people, Nigeria is a state that calls ourself a nation. Nigeria calls ourself a nation.

The people of over 250 tribes, they are calling it a nation. That's in Nigeria: a nation is a people of

the same, maybe blood, ethnic ancestry or something. So how do you make a people of over 200

tribes a nation? It means that you have to cultivate, you have to make everyone realize that they

belong. You know something you do have because Nigeria's actually a state. Now if you recognize

that Nigeria is a state, what do you do?

Dr. Francis Njoku: Aristotle said, dissimilar form a state, similar do not form a state. A state is made

up of different kinds of people, is a place of diversity, they come together. So that's why they need

their dispositions. In fact, one of the social virtues is friendship. You need the dispositions of

friendship, justice, equity, to soften the rough edges so that people can unite together, so that the

dissimilar form a state, unlike Plato. Plato had a homogenous state, and he says, no, the state—if it's

so homogenous, you end up becoming a military continent. That's what you have in Nigeria now,

some group wants to run the whole place. So from presidents to everything, they own everything.

They cannot be a state; a state is a place of diversity. I have the Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, is mixed. You

know what, you corner more to culturalism and the rest of them. That is the basis for a state,

because actually as I said, our diversity can bring us together and we have a great blend.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So African countries, I don't know any African country that is one state ethnic

group now. I don't even know which, even Israel is mixed somehow, because I'm sure there are

some Ethiopians who have Israeli blood or something like that. So it's difficult to have, most states

now, even the so-called one ratio state, difficult to have one single. So even if it is one person, the

whole label, even Igbo groups within themselves are not a homogenous group. They have all kinds

of migrated groups and all kinds of means of origin. Even though you will say that they belong to

one race, we still have to manage diversity, even in the same family. Some like to do medicine, others

have disposition for engineering.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So there must be diversity, even as a person, sometime you want to go and walk,

instead of flying. It is part of it, just that the degree of management and the degree of extension of

diversity. So if we harness these things together, we can come—it doesn't mean that there wouldn't

be friction. That one person who made a distinction between the politics and the political. Politics

are about management of the state, but the political in terms of human beings have sociopolitical

tensions between groups who continue to be there or workers who continue to protest. Some

groups social, some human right groups who continue to protest about certain things, those are

tensions that go with civil society. They must be there, even when we have solved our political

problems, they are human sociological problems.

Christelle Inema: So this brings me to a question that ties into one of the democracy that you

presented, where you can bring a third person like the witness. So in this case, with Nigeria having

over 200 ethnic groups and diversity. And maybe this is a trick question, I'm not sure, it's for you to

decide. But do you think there would be a better approach to a way to govern, like bringing

someone else in because they're not going to have any stake in any of the ethnic groups that are

available? And if we decide in this world that we are making that that's the way to go, who do you

think would be there? What kind of qualities would that person need to have to be able to bring

Nigeria together?

Dr. Francis Njoku: This is a model, those are models of… theoretical models. But before you do

that, you have to do the groundwork. Whether it's a Yoruba man there or a Hausa, you have to do

the groundwork, that people are where their profit virtues. And they consciously make that choice,

make a pact, and respect it. So it doesn't matter again, whether the person there is from north or

south because he knows the goods on which the society is built, and he pursues that common good

that he is also a part of his group. It is a theoretical standpoint.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So if I see myself as a leader now, then I need to commit myself, I see that this

thing I'm doing, I've also a stake in it. It's a different disposition, I'll do what? But if I also see it, the

same leader there that now these things, all these guys, not come from my own ethnic group. So my

role is to be impartial and make sure that everything gets. So is a theoretical position, it's a

rationalization. The same person can see himself as a member of covenant… good, he'll work with a

lot of zeal. The same person also can see himself as a safe guarder of the covenant. He's not there to

manipulate. So it's a theoretical… and whichever disposition that a man is, from these positions,

whichever disposition is good enough to manage the affairs of the group.

Christelle Inema: Yes, and as one of my last questions, I'm just interested, it's going to be a fun

question now. What book would you recommend that relates to Africa, African proverbs and issues,

the best, your favorite book?

Dr. Francis Njoku: Well, I don't know what you mean by that.

Christelle Inema: I don't know, any fiction, non-fiction, just for people who are listening to the

podcast too.

Dr. Francis Njoku: Well, there are kinds of books or novels that talk about African proverbs, it

depends on what you want and what you want to do. When I use some African novels, for example,

what I've been doing lately is to rationalize, to derive philosophy from literature, from what African

writers are saying. When you read James Ngugi, Weep Not, Child, or Achebe's, Things Fall Apart, and

the rest of them. They say literature is not philosophy, but it can give you materials for

philosophizing and so it depends on your interest. And some of African realities are documented in

these novels in… it depends what you are looking for.

Dr. Francis Njoku: When I came back from Israel, I'd say that I was going to do something for my,

I have to articulate the philosophy and do it from, with using the materials I have. I listened to

folklores, to proverbs… we have stories, in some of mine, I tell stories. Then I think our job is to

draw or make explicit the philosophy implicit in this non-philosophical. So it depends what is your

interest. See, if you're interested in literature, I have a body of literature, and there are also some

who, like I said, will be blaming the white man, no problem. I know that we can blame, and there

was a lot of manipulation of African reality. But I think it's a long time, we started to find the

solution from within. If we do what we are supposed to do from within, then we'll be strong enough

to face the external learning. There is no free meal in international market, no. You understand me?

Dr. Francis Njoku: And there's something Euphrates said, he said that we should be careful. Some

people… the first devastation of Africa was when the colonial people came and imposed their rule

on us, but he said there's a second one, he warned people. The people will be talking about African

unity, you think they're interested in your unity. No, they're not interested in your unity, they lend

you money, they're not interested in that. Sometimes they lend you money, bring their own

expatriates to undermine the whole project. We experience that in Nigeria with the Romans, with

Ghana, and the rest of them.

Dr. Francis Njoku: There's a folk story. The lion visited the sheep and asked the sheep if any of the

children could come and babysit for the lion family, imagine that. So the sheep thought long and

hard, he said, "Okay, no problem. That should get back to the lion." Then when the lion left, the

sheep called the children and said, "How many of you, how many times will someone do something

to you before you retaliate?" They began to answer, this one said, "If you do something, the first

one, I will ignore you. The third, the fifth, maybe the tenth one, I'll retaliate." The sheep watched the

children answer. The particular child, we'll call it the lamb with luck, or the lamb with practical

reasonableness. He said, "Mom, before you do something for me, even if before you think to harm

me, I'll retaliate." He said, "You are the right guy to go and babysit for the lion."

Dr. Francis Njoku: Our leaders are there. How can you be complaining? We know out there is a

state of nature. So leaders have responsibility to represent their families, their country, you need that

to be able to… we know there's danger out there, but we have to navigate it. The president,

Nigerian Minister of Transport, they signed an agreement with China, and the thing was that Nigeria

could see sovereign to Chinese, they say, "But what about it?" He didn't read, or they didn't read

their thing written in Chinese, and they're representing their country, their own people.

Dr. Francis Njoku: So it means that even the children, they came and raped our mother. Still the

children have disappointed the mother, the land. So if you're expressing dissatisfaction, both with

the present children of Africa, we have disappointed. Because some have gotten education to reason

at the level of the so-called external people. Still, because of the little benefits you get, then you sell

the whole continent. When you are there in the position to do something for your people, you

sabotage it. Now it is high time we stopped concentrating on—for the meantime, for sake of

argument—concentrating on the threat from without and then concentrate on the threat from

within.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Francis Njoku.

This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our

interviewer, Christelle Inema. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued

support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute's research and events, visit

thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi. This is Reema, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast.

Reema Saleh: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world, and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Annie Henderson: What should we learn from the aftermath of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and what decisions could've brought a better outcome? The fall of Kabul to the Taliban marked the end of America's longest war in history, with the former Afghan government being able to retain control of the country. In this episode, we speak with Carter Malkasian, a historian and author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History. It provides a comprehensive history of U.S. intervention, conflict, and withdrawal over the course of the war.

Carter Malkasian: Hi. I'm Carter Malkasian. I like to think of myself as a historian. I am a professor at The Naval Postgraduate School right now. I've spent lots of time in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and that's what I wrote a book on, and I try to speak Pashto here and there, and try to study Afghanistan, study other historical topics. I think that covers me pretty well.

Annie Henderson: To start our conversation, the war in Afghanistan spanned across four U.S. presidents. Can you give us a brief history of how the U.S. approach to Afghanistan has shifted over the past 20 years?

Carter Malkasian: Yeah, that's no problem. If you want to talk about our approach in broad strategy, we started out in 2001, after Osama bin Laden attacked the United States, wanting to go into Afghanistan, capture him, destroy Al Qaeda, and topple the Taliban movement that was associated with Al Qaeda, but we often judged as being one in the same. In reality, they weren't, but we kind of thought that at the time. But we went in with just a small number of troops, at that time. By the beginning of 2002, there was still fewer than 8,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Carter Malkasian: After we removed the Taliban, then we had to help establish a new government in Afghanistan. That government ends up being run by Hamid Karzai. Our idea is, at that time, we want to continue to maintain pressure against terrorist groups. We're also going to help build a democracy. During these first years, we kept a small number of troops in the country. We tried to do a few things with helping democracy, and slowly, we started doing a little bit more to help with nation-building, and we did things to help with women's rights.

Carter Malkasian: We didn't want to have too large of a footprint, because we thought that wouldn't be sustainable, and we were overconfident, and thought the Taliban had been totally defeated and weren't going to come back.

Carter Malkasian: This starts to change in 2006. The Taliban had reorganized by then, and fighting was breaking out throughout large parts of the country. So, we slowly start to send more troops into Afghanistan so that we're getting upwards, by 2009, we're approaching about 40,000 troops in the country. The goal has stopped being just to create a democracy and do terrorist operations. The goal has now become to… The goal was originally to defeat the Taliban, but now, that goal reemerges. That goal returns, because we had though the Taliban were defeated, and it turned out, they weren't. So, between 2006 to 2008, the goal becomes, we are going to actually defeat the Taliban and remove them. We don't want to send too many troops to do it, but that's our goal, and we're not going to stop until that's done.

Carter Malkasian: President Obama comes in, and he shifts some of that strategy. He is willing to send in more troops, and so the number of troops under him, between 2009 and 2011, raises to 100,000 U.S. troops in the country, which is the peak level that we get to. But his goal is not to defeat the Taliban. His goal is to break their momentum, make sure we defeat Al Qaeda, and to help the government enough that it can stand up on its own.

Carter Malkasian: So those forces and that stays in place until 2011 when President Obama starts to begin drawing down our forces. He draws down the forces down to about 9,600 by the end of 2014. He also wanted to get out, but he wasn't able to do that. Our goals in Afghanistan at this time again shift dramatically. Our focus just becomes on giving advising and assistance to the Afghan security forces. Our goals become to continue to operate against terrorist groups, but our goal certainly isn't to defeat the Taliban. It's really to stop having combat with them at all.

Carter Malkasian: That changes again in 2016, for a variety of reasons. Really, the strategy then turns into is we don't leave Afghanistan. We stay there, and the idea is, we'll have a small number of troops, and it's always around 10,000. We stay there. We prevent things from going bad, prevent the Taliban from taking over. Goals like nation-building, human rights are really not there. Now, protecting democracy and protecting human rights, that does kind of retain itself throughout. Democracy is more explicit than women's rights. Women's rights is more of an implicit goal that continues to exist in Afghanistan.

Carter Malkasian: Then finally, by the time that Trump comes in, the strategy changes more. We enter into negotiations with the Taliban to try to leave within 14 months. President Biden comes in, and we do that. So, that was a very quick overview of the war, and I'm not sure I covered everything you needed me to cover.

Annie Henderson: No, I think that's very helpful, and some of it is, we're trying to just ground people in so many different events that's happening. So, just trying to give people a good sense of where a couple of things have been happening. One thing I'm really curious about is, one of your books is War Comes to Garmser, is that how you--

Carter Malkasian: Garmser.

Reema Saleh: Garmser.

Carter Malkasian: It means hot place in Dari.

Annie Henderson: Well, it's in Southern Afghanistan ...

Carter Malkasian: Yes, it is.

Annie Henderson: So it is very aptly named, I assume. This was modeled after War Comes to Long An, which is a book about the Vietnam war. So, I'm really curious, as a historian, how do you view the comparisons that have been made between the Afghanistan and the Vietnam wars?

Carter Malkasian: On the one hand, when you're talking about how the U.S. does strategy and policy, you start seeing similarities, the length of the war, the fact that the earlier part of the war, we don't have a lot of forces. Then, we increase the number of forces. That increase in forces doesn't produce anything. We have phases of the war where we think counterinsurgency will work or nation-building will work, just like we did in Vietnam, and it doesn't succeed.

Carter Malkasian: We eventually get involved in negotiations with the adversary, and yet those negotiations follow a startlingly similar path, that in both cases, we're trying to get the adversary to concede, and in neither cases do they do that. In both cases, we're trying to trade our withdrawal of our troops to get the adversary to do something, and in both cases, we get very little out of the adversary, further withdrawal of our forces. In both cases, the end is a humiliating withdrawal from the capital of the country.

Carter Malkasian: Now, on the other hand, there are dramatic differences between Afghanistan and Vietnam, which are probably more important. At its height in Vietnam, we had about 600,000 troops on the ground. 100,000 is the height here, and for most of time, we had far fewer than that. 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. In Afghanistan, it's still incredibly tragic, but the number is just shy of 2,500. So, there's a dramatic difference in that.

Carter Malkasian: Also, Vietnam, we have the draft, so people can be conscripted to go and fight. There's no draft in Afghanistan. In Vietnam, we have protests and riots throughout the country on a regular basis against the war. I challenge you to think of a single protest against the Afghan war. I don't even know of one at Berkeley, where I did my undergrad. I suspect there was one, but it's an indication of how the war had incredibly low salience for the America people. The American people maybe didn't think the war was necessary, but people weren't standing up to stop it. There was no real political cost for presidents staying in, somewhat of a political cost to getting out, if things went bad. So, these are fairly significant differences between the two.

Carter Malkasian: The other thing to really remember is that Vietnam did not involve a direct attack on the United States. The domino theory, that doesn't come from a direct attack on the United States. Afghanistan did have that, so that creates a greater reason to stay.

Carter Malkasian: I think, to nail the difference even more, that Afghanistan was a forgotten war while it was going on. It's likely to be forgotten quite soon. It's already being forgotten. Vietnam's not going to be forgotten. It's a part of the culture. It's deeply embedded in how America thinks about itself. So, that is also a dramatic difference between the two.

Annie Henderson: Can I ask why you think that is? I guess growing up, I don't really think of anti-war movements against the war in Afghanistan. I think that is a very marked difference, and I'm not sure why.

Carter Malkasian: The easiest way for me to say… The easiest ways to say it are, not as many Americans involved, not as many people having a son or… well, women weren't conscripted at that time, having a son drafted, being sent to go to the war, and possibly dying in the course of the war. Versus here, American service men and women volunteer to join, and they're sent out by choice, and those numbers are much smaller than the number of people who were going to Vietnam and being exposed to combat. So, that just means, on its own, you have a smaller base of people who are going to be most affected and most upset.

Carter Malkasian: Then, you have how we've treated the war because the war involved an attack on the United States, I think the press did certain things differently. There aren't pictures on the TV of wounded U.S. soldiers, or marines, or sailors, or airmen. That was the case during the Vietnam war. So, you don't see these highly traumatic pictures of what's going on. Now, there's battles and other, and there's plenty of coverage of it, and you can read about many things, but that level of really visceral feeling isn't there the same way. So, I think those help us understand it in a way that, how that's different from Vietnam.

Reema Saleh: Coming into your career a little bit more, you spent two years in Garmser, which is in Southern Afghanistan, as we discussed. You were there as a political officer with the State Department. What was your experience like, living in Afghanistan, meeting with the people there?

Carter Malkasian: It was one of the greatest experiences I have had, I think, because I got to go out, and you saw the Afghans every day. You saw the people coming into the base for something, and you'd go out places, and you'd go to the districts just about every day to see all the people that were coming into the lineup to go talk to, whether a village elder, someone coming in with a problem, policemen, religious leaders. They would be there to talk with.

Carter Malkasian: Then, occasionally, some women would come in. We had a few of the women on the team, and they would do most of those conversations, but sometimes, I was lucky enough to get to hear. That's very much a hidden part of Afghanistan, for most of us. You may see some women, especially if you're in Kabul, but if you're in the villages, you're not seeing many. You're not really supposed to talk to women.

Carter Malkasian: There's a lot about Afghanistan we still don't know, but there's a whole part of their society that was secluded from us, partitioned from us quite purposefully. It's disturbing in many, many ways. I say that in a sense that, I was lucky enough to see that, to have some small, very, very small window into that.

Carter Malkasian: Then, we would go to the villages, and eventually, things were good enough in the district that I could go to the villages without marines and go with the Afghans there, and spend time in those areas, and whether walking in the fields or sitting in a compound. When it was getting close to the time I was going to leave, kind of wondered how I would leave. I was sitting in a meeting. I was looking across at a variety of tribal leaders with their turbans on, and we were discussing politics and where things were going. I thought, "Wow, how am I going to leave this?" This is so unique, so different, in such a completely different, engrossing environment, that I thought, "How can I leave this?" But it's best for everyone's health if one does leave. If you stay somewhere for too long, I don't think it's a good thing.

Carter Malkasian: Then, I kept in touch with many of the friends there over time. Their lives are shorter than our lives are. They look at life a different way. There's many more things that are going to cause them to have an early death, and they know it. A lot of it's very, very random. They can't control when their time is going to come, not that… none of us can really control it, but they can't reduce it much. So, the next day is of much greater value than it is to us. Enjoying the moment, enjoying the night, enjoying the meal, enjoying the music, matters more. Worrying less about working every single day matters, because working every single day may not matter in the end, because something random can happen.

Carter Malkasian: You notice it in terms of, you have a certain… you're used to, in the United States, the rate at which people leave us. But in Afghanistan, if you're there for a while… Yeah, so that two years wasn't the only two years that I stayed there. I went after that, and then I kept in contact, and then I went there again. But you notice that the rate of people who are dying, who you know, is much greater than in the United States. That just enforces to you about how their lives are different.

Carter Malkasian: That also makes us understand how people feel about the Taliban right now. Why do they  want to increase the risk that they're going to die early, increase the risk that they're going to extend the war? If letting the Taliban come in gives them a few more days of peace, it just helps one understand that situation.

Reema Saleh: I think that's a very interesting take. It's very refreshing to hear from someone who looks at this through a human lens, instead of, I think there's a lot written on how the Afghan people feel that comes from I think more… lacks a level of empathy about how they're actually living and experiencing their lives. So, I really, really liked what you have to say about that.

Carter Malkasian: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Annie Henderson: President Obama announced the beginning of troop draw-downs in 2014, and this was right before he became Special Assistant to Joint Chief of Staff Chairman General Joseph Dunford. How did this announcement impact your role and your work?

Carter Malkasian: President Trump's announcement or President Obama's?

Reema Saleh: Did I say President Trump or President Obama?

Carter Malkasian: President Obama in May of 2014?

Reema Saleh: Yes.

Carter Malkasian: At that time, I was in Afghanistan. So, I remember that specifically. That had come after a long period of discussion about what the U.S. policy was going to be in Afghanistan, and how many troops we were going to keep, because it wasn't known if we were going to down to no troops, if we were going to keep maybe 10,000 troops, as roughly was kept, if we were going to have 12,000 troops, and what the role of those troops were going to be. There was a lot of concern that we would leave entirely, and the country could fall apart, a lot of it's on the part of the Afghans, and some in the U.S. government about that.

Carter Malkasian: So, there was careful negotiations, careful discussions about that, that were very well-handled to make sure they didn't get into the press, and they weren't politicized. Well, everything's politicized, but that they were less politicized than other things were. That ended up coming out that we would have a draw-down, down first in that year to 98, 9,600 and then that number would stay until 2015. Beginning of 2016, we would drop down to 5,500. Then, at the end, we would leave.

Carter Malkasian: Honestly, the sense that we had at that time was, we're pretty much doing things on track. That this will allow the Afghans to have some more advising, some more time with the Americans. It will help cover our security interests during that time. And then, the U.S. forces will leave. At that time, it also wasn't clear okay, so how many forces will stay at the embassy? What kind of role will they be having? So, it was kind of well, the future could… this could play out in a certain way, and we move forward.

Carter Malkasian: There wasn't a lot of negative reaction to that decision, at least where I was. It was, we're moving forward, and this is how things are going. Now, later on, those decisions get reversed, and they were reversed, like I mentioned before, because the Islamic State threat, but also reversed because the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, as the Taliban were taking more ground, so that if you're not there, if we go down to zero, then the Taliban will be able to succeed, and that will create terrorist threats upon the United States. That was the thinking.

Annie Henderson: So, as you move into this new role as Special Assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could you maybe just inform our listeners how civilian and military leaders work together on a conflict like Afghanistan? I think this is one of those things, as an expert I'm sure is very clear, but I think to a lot of people who are not familiar with how the U.S. works on this particular issue, it'd be really great to get a lay of the land.

Carter Malkasian: All right, so first of all, my role as a civilian is, there was to advise General Dunford. I was not a decision-maker. I was just someone advising him, really advising him for the advice he was going to give, or how he was going to interact in an engagement with a foreign leader, or maybe getting information for him, to help do things. So, I wasn't a policymaker myself.

Carter Malkasian: Now, how civilians and the military interact, the military has different high-ranking generals and admirals, which are often called four stars, and that's for the number of stars that they have on their collar, and sometimes on their… this is not a lapel, this is a shoulder. Those generals have a great deal of influence. Some of them command a service, like the Air Force, or the Marine Corps, or the Navy. Some of them command large commands, like Central Command, that you may have heard of, that handles the Middle East, or IndoPaCom Command, which handles all of the Pacific and out into the Indian ocean.

Carter Malkasian: Then, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he is a forcer. He's the most senior of them. He doesn't command them all. The person who commands them all, the way that chain of command works is, it first goes to the Secretary of Defense, so he has authority there, and then the President has authority there.

Carter Malkasian: Now, when a decision on a policy issue is made, it's usually made by the National Security Council, which at its highest level is going to be the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense civilians, and then usually the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a military representative. Sometimes, other generals may be there too, like the Centcom Commander and the IndoPaCom Commander, just depending on the situation. But when those decision are made, it's the President gets ... and there can be other people in National Security councils, like the Intelligence Director will be there. I'm just trying to give a general sense of what that looks like.

Carter Malkasian: The President makes the ultimate decision. The job of the military, the military cannot decide to enter a war, to leave a war. The military does not set policy goals. It doesn't say, "This is the reason we're in the war, and this is the reason we're going to attain it." What the military does is designs how to attain it and often gives options to the President or Secretary of Defense about how this can be attained.

Carter Malkasian: Now, for any particular issue, the chairmen or other military can offer their advice to the President about what to do, but that advice generally should stay out of… should definitely stay out of domestic politics, and should also stay away from policy goals. Everything's blurry. The domestic policy is not blurry, but the policy goals for the war that's very blurry, in terms of what's involved, who should have say in what, and who should be doing others. But in general, the military leadership should try to stay away from talking too much about the goals of a war.

Carter Malkasian: Why? Because you don't want the people who… Well, the main reason is, you don't want… the crucial thing is, you don't want them encouraging us to get into war. War is their business, so we want to keep that separate. But there's other reasons too, if there's anything about getting out of a war, it's perhaps best that the military is not giving advice on that, that that also works well for the President or what the goals of a conflict are. So, at the highest level, the civil military interaction works like that.

Carter Malkasian: But it works its way onto the lower level too, because within the Department of Defense, there's the military side. There's a whole nother office called the Office of the Secretary of Defense. So, they have lots of civilians in there, and they will help set policy goals, help with planning, help with giving… managing the force and making sure the policy goals are implemented, and then helping the SecDef, the Secretary of Defense, shape what he wants to do, and create his plans for what he wants to do. The military is kind of working in the same direction and will either give their advice separately to the Secretary of Defense or will work with OSD to give a common set of advice to them.

Carter Malkasian: Now, within these groups, I mentioned that there was the National Security Council. The National Security Council is a word with two meanings to it, which can be confusing. One is the National Security Council I just referred to, with a small number of people involved in it, one of whom I forgot to mention is the National Security Advisor. So, if you've heard of Henry Kissinger, I'm sure, or Brzezinski, more recently H.R. McMaster, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, they were all National Security Advisors. Their role is to advise the President on national security, but probably more important, to coordinate that National Security Council meeting and the interaction between those other major players I mentioned at that National Security Council.

Carter Malkasian: Okay, so the other need for the National Security Council… I mentioned that one. The other one is the staff that serves the National Security Advisor and the President on national security issues. So, that staff that exists, they help coordinate those meetings, coordinate between all these different… the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Intelligence. They help do the coordination between them, and they're often the ones that write the papers, that will go to the President and explain the issue in the first place, or write papers that explain what the decisions were of the various meetings.

Carter Malkasian: So, there's a combination of military on that staff and civilians on that staff. The civilians will interact both with the military on this stuff, plus they'll interact with the military and the Department of Defense. So, they will be creating their own issue briefings and their own ways of addressing topics that they are then talking to the military with.

Carter Malkasian: The last element of the civil-military relations, as I try not to turn this into a total lecture, is a relationship between Congress and the military, which is extremely important. In fact, the relationship with… You can often forget just how important that relationship is, because Congress confirms who… the three and four star generals up. They were confirmed by Congress. They have to report to Congress. They have to share essentially any information that Congress wants. There are certain political things and certain decisions that can be kept quiet or held in a classified session until it's coordination necessary that Congress needs to know.

Carter Malkasian: But Congress has a right to know these things. Congress approves the budgets. So, that is an important mechanism of authority, and checking and balancing against the military. But it's the answering to Congress that also ensures that the military is not overstepping its bounds and is probably more powerful in that respect than certain other elements of the government. The President is very powerful, and the Secretary of Defense is very powerful in that way, as well, but it's the combination there that plays a very big, big role.

Reema Saleh: Yeah, so I guess how did the wants of civilian and military leadership balance each other out, at the time, I guess, different aims kind of interact?

Carter Malkasian: They played out in different ways throughout the conflict. Early in the, say, in the Bush administration, it often played out with the civilians getting what they wanted on things, and that it's often highly criticized that in 2003, the military didn't have enough of a role in giving advice and setting planning, and allowed an invasion to go forward that shouldn't have gone forward because the military didn't defend its ground, didn't argue strongly, didn't show how difficult the situation could be, when many, many knew that.

Carter Malkasian: So, that later leads to a little bit of a recalibration at the end of the Bush administration, in which President Bush starts relaying on General Petraeus to get things done, because he feels that General Petraeus can actually take action, and he removes Rumsfeld. So, the generals, General Petraeus, McChrystal, some others, Mullen, who's then the Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they're able to have a lot of influence. Then, they have the success in the Iraq surge.

Carter Malkasian: It doesn't go as well in the early Obama administration. In the early Obama administration, there's a great interest on the part of a lot of the military in sending a large number of troops into Afghanistan, trying to resolve the situation in Afghanistan. They feel they can do that because of the success of their operations in Iraq previously. So, the same generals that had gained influence, the same generals that had gained influenced under Bush come into the Obama administration with that point of view, with that mindset, and that leads to friction with the new incoming Obama administration.

Carter Malkasian: In this case, a lot of military leaders feel that Afghanistan is very important to go into, to resolve the situation there, whereas President Obama, in his book A Promised Land, discusses this in great detail. It is a great book. He is more worried about the country as a whole. He's worried about the recession that's happened. He's worried about his healthcare package. He's worried about all the other things he has to worry about as President.

Carter Malkasian: So, he doesn't want to commit large numbers of forces to Afghanistan forever, because it costs about a million dollars a year for one soldier in Afghanistan, which that means for 100,000 troops, that computes, with a little bit additional that's there, it computed to 100, 120 billion per year. So, over the total, over the whole tenure, the petroleum dollars, that's the size of the Economic Relief Package. So, he thought, I'm not spending this kind of money on an engagement in Afghanistan, compared to economic relief for the American people. He was not comfortable with going in that direction, so there was friction there.

Carter Malkasian: Then, there was more friction because the military didn't present a lot of options to the President. One of the most important things that should be presented to leaders are options, different ways to go about solving what a problem should be. But they didn't do that, and so that made it hard for President Obama to have choices on what to do.

Carter Malkasian: The biggest problem there at that time was what Biden and others defined as, the generals, to a certain extent, wanted to… inadvertently or purposefully boxed in the president, because they started talking on TV about how their option, which was counterinsurgency and sending more forces, was the best option. They did it in front of Congress. There was an op ed; McChrystal did it in London. There was a leak of McChrystal's assessment that this should be done.

Carter Malkasian: So, what all this does is, it makes it much more difficult for the President to do whatever he wants to do, because the military has laid out there, "This is my plan." So, if the President doesn't do that, and anything goes wrong, all the critics are going to say, "You didn't listen to the generals." The new President incoming, so it's even more difficult to deal with these problems. You asked about the friction between the civilians and the military. That is a foremost example of the friction, the difficulties that existed.

Carter Malkasian: Later on, it improves, probably because some of those generals left, for various reasons, and it improves because the generals that followed them, and the admirals that followed them, were much more concerned about maintaining trust of the White House. Also, they were just less… They believed less that you could actually win in Afghanistan.

Carter Malkasian: You talked about the 2014, Obama's decision to withdraw in 2014. That whole process was managed very carefully and kept secret because everyone was so aware that letting it loose previously had been problematic. Everyone's intent was, we're going down the same path, and we're going to find the best solution. We're not going to get stuck into arguing for whatever option we particularly might think is best. It's not about what options is best. It's about laying out a way forward that's a good process and doesn't create problems and issues. So, that went better. Anyways--

Annie Henderson: No. That actually is really helpful, because I was going to ask you about your personal experience. You mention transitioning between Presidents, and you've served under both Barack Obama and President Trump. So, I'm curious, how was that transition for you personally? What was it like, switching your advice from one president to another?

Carter Malkasian: Because I was advising General Dunford, it wasn't that hard for me, because I didn't have to… I had the same boss. I had the same leader who I was giving advice to. I was working in the military structure, not in the civilian structure. Civilian structure requires lots of new leaders. The military structure just went about doing its thing, right? They have a whole process for when generals come into certain places, and officers come into certain places, and they go to a new place. So, that process just kept on going the same way it was before.

Carter Malkasian: People know that the Trump administration was very turbulent, but I was in a place where I didn't have those similar experiences because I was there advising the same boss that I had had previously. Did the issues change? Yes, the issues changed. The approach to Syria was a little bit different. The whole North Korea crisis with Kim Jong-un, and shooting missiles into the air and fiery rhetoric, that was all there. We worked a great deal to try to make sure that situation was dealt with responsibly. Over time, President Trump shifts the Afghan policy even more to talk about getting out, and so I was involved in those negotiations. So, there's no doubt we were dealing with different issues.

Carter Malkasian: But personally, it wasn't that tough. Look, there's all kinds of other ethical and other issues regarding that administration, but I was divorced from that because of the place I was in, which gave one a comfort in what they were doing.

Reema Saleh: Let's talk about the withdrawal. You were part of negotiations with the Taliban under President Trump, which resulted in the Doha Agreement in 2021. Could you talk us through these negotiations, and what was this approach to ending the war in Afghanistan?

Carter Malkasian: First, there was a realization that… this was about 2017 actually, that a lot of the military operations should be support negotiations, that a negotiated solution could be a way out of the conflict that satisfied everyone's interests. At that time, the idea of withdrawing all of our troops wasn't really… that wasn't really there in 2017, although some people, myself included, said, "Look, you're not going to get a deal unless you do that. The Taliban are not going to stop fighting if there's U.S. soldiers, so whatever the deal involves, it's going to have to involve withdrawal of our forces."

Carter Malkasian: There's President Trump, who kind of enforces that and wants that to happen, such that Ambassador Khalilzad then… after negotiations start, which is really in the autumn of 2018, then he puts that on the table, and then things start shifting, where the Taliban are willing to give a little more.

Carter Malkasian: What we wanted from the Taliban was for them to… We wanted a few things from the Taliban. One was that they would guarantee that they wouldn't help assist Al Qaeda, wouldn't let Al Qaeda launch any attacks from Afghanistan on other countries. So, that was one of the most… That was negotiated intensively, and of course, we want as many guarantees as we can get. They want as much freedom of action as they can get.

Carter Malkasian: So, that goes back and forth. But the Taliban did promise, "We won't train, equip, recruit, fundraise, allow any of that to… allow any training, equipping, fundraising to happen inside of Afghanistan. We won't allow there to be attacks from Afghanistan on other countries." That was in return for the idea that, at some point, we would completely withdraw our forces.

Carter Malkasian: We wanted a ceasefire. We also wanted there to be a political settlement between the Afghans and the Taliban. We wanted them to come together, go through a new political process, write a new constitution, set up a new government, so that it would be inclusive and all sides would be brought together, a negotiated end to the fighting.

Carter Malkasian: Now, to make that happen, eventually, it's decided to withdraw ... within 14 months, to withdraw all of our forces. So, negotiations go in that direction. Look, dealing with the Taliban, it was fascinating. It wasn't my first time dealing with them, but I can tell you that they were very committed, believed in their cause, believed in establishing Islamic law throughout Afghanistan, were deeply religious, not fake. They really do pray five times a day, and they really are committed to Islam. Four of them had been in Guantanamo Bay prison and had been released earlier, and they were now part of the negotiating group. They were, of course, interesting to talk to. Some of them didn't seem to like Americans very much. Others were more okay with talking to Americans. One of that group was particularly athletic and enjoyed playing football and such, which was interesting.

Carter Malkasian: The Taliban generally were standoffish, and that's kind of a combination of two things, I think. One is that we were their adversary, and the other is, they are established, accomplished people in their own respects, so they just might've felt that that was appropriate to do. But they could, at times, be warm and interested, and I certainly learned a bit about Islam from them, and certainly learned a few new words from them. So, that went really well.

Carter Malkasian: But anyway, so the agreement was signed in 29 February of 2022. A friend of mine calls it the Leap Year Agreement. That stipulated the withdrawal in 14 months. What it wasn't able to stipulate was on a firm ceasefire. It wasn't able to stipulate real political negotiations. It said political negotiations to start by 10 March, I think, so it was about 10 days. It had certain small requirements about what those negotiations should establish, but it wasn't detailed and firm about it. It didn't say that you need to have a constitution by now, or that we will only withdraw if these things are met.

Carter Malkasian: So, it's open-ended. It's what in diplomatic terms is called constructive ambiguity, which is the idea that if two sides don't get on very well and have lots of differences, if we can just look at, what is a common goal we have in the future, and say, "Okay, we're both after that goal," then we can at least advance in that direction, and the process can get moving. Without specifying what each side is going to give, what the negotiations are specifically going to look like. We just have a broad agreement on principles.

Carter Malkasian: So, that was the idea behind this, but in the end, there weren't enough details in it, I think, for it to survive. So, after that's signed, well a few things happened. First, the Taliban are intransigent, and they won’t—and by this time I’m not part of the negotiations anymore—the Taliban are intransigent. They are not going to concede on any further movement until they get every single thing that they want out of the Afghan government.

Carter Malkasian: Another part of it is that the Afghan government, President Ashraf Ghani, wasn't terribly interested in making a lot of concessions, partly because he thinks, "I don't have that much more left to give. Why am I going to give more? We have to start negotiations some time, and they're making me give everything before I get to negotiations. I'm not doing that." His position is certainly understandable. Whether it was right for us or turned out the best is perhaps a different question.

Carter Malkasian: The third reason though that things didn't go well was that President Trump withdrew our forces ahead of the schedule. We have a certain rate of what the draw-down was supposed to be. He went ahead of that rate. As we withdrew more forces, we were less able to hold things together on the battlefield. So, the Taliban could sense that they were gaining more ground and could sense that we were not going to be determined… that we were going to carry out the 14 months, or something close to it. So, there wasn't a lot of reason for them to continue to negotiate with us. We were losing our leverage.

Carter Malkasian: So then, by the time President Biden has to make a decision, he's judging between go to zero or keep 2,500. Well, keep 2,500 could perhaps have done some things, like still going after terrorists and such, but 2,500 wasn't going to be enough to convince the Taliban to come seriously to the negotiating table with concessions, because they knew at 2,500, they could control a lot of the country.

Reema Saleh: This actually leads into the next question we're hoping to ask you, which is, President Biden did largely stick to the agreement that was laid out and the plan I think that had come out of those agreements. So, I'm really curious, did this surprise you, or would you say that President Biden had any kind of additional changes to that plan in any meaningful way, besides pushing back the timelines?

Carter Malkasian: He pushed back the timeline. It depends how you look at the agreements, is a better way to say it. The agreement by one point of view, the view that Zalmay Khalilzad the envoy often said, was that nothing's agreed until everything's agreed, which meant that if the Taliban don't meet what we want… They even say this verbally. You can hear Pompeo say this and Khalilzad say this, "If they don't come to a political settlement, well then we're not withdrawing. Our withdrawal is conditioned upon them meeting what has been agreed upon at Doha." Now, some of the things agreed upon at Doha, if they're not written down, they become fuzzy and ambiguous. So, we would say that.

Carter Malkasian: But the biggest thing President Biden basically did is, he moved off that point, and we were withdrawing. I guess we could debate whether we see it as a fundamental change or a minor change in what was done. But he moved off that. Now, between the… At the time, I thought the decision between staying and leaving, they're both viable options. We could have done either, but leaving, from a strategic, big picture view appeared to be the more compelling of the two choices. Again, that doesn't mean staying was not viable, or ridiculous, or crazy or something. It wasn't. It could've been done.

Carter Malkasian: It wasn't going to solve the war. It wasn't going to end the war. It was just going to protect our interests. Even me saying it that way is the wrong way to say it. It puts greater insurance against our interests. We don't know if it protects it or not. There's greater insurance against it. So, that's a viable strategy, but leaving was also a viable strategy, and given, for all the reasons that I talked about previously, by this point, much more compelling to leave.

Reema Saleh: Was this approach popular with the military? How did the military leadership view the process of leaving?

Carter Malkasian: I think that probably varies a little bit, and I wasn't privy to the discussions in 2021 in any serious kind of way. So, I can tell you that the decisions to leave and to go forward with negotiations, and press forward with negotiations, that the generals whom I worked with, General Dunford, General Miller, General McKenzie, General Votel, they were all behind the negotiations. They did not argue against the negotiations. They did not, when decisions had to be made about negotiations, I mean including the final agreement, they didn't say, "Oh, we're not going with this. We reject it." Because they believed that it was the military's job being in support of the diplomacy, they supported moving forward with the negotiations and with that final agreement.

Carter Malkasian: Does that mean that there weren't debates and issues between the civilians and the military? Of course not. On a variety of little issues, and little things, and can't we get more here, and why do we give so much here, of course there's debates and issues on that. But there was no, "We refuse to go with this agreement."

Carter Malkasian: Now, in the open press, when it comes to President Biden's final decision to leave, it said that various generals, including General Milley, thought that we should've kept more forces there, and thought that this was better… Now, this is just in the press, so I can't confirm anything that's there, because I don't know. I haven't talked to anyone who's in those meetings. I obviously haven't seen meeting notes on it. So, I don't know what actually happened there, but that's probably just indicative of, once we're in the process of leaving, it just becomes harder.

Carter Malkasian: So, it was one thing to say it's the more compelling choice to do in early 2021, it's way different to see it playing out on the ground, and when you're seeing Kabul fall, and you're talking to people you know over the phone, and people are worried, people think they're going to die, some people are dying, and everything's crumbling and falling apart.

Carter Malkasian: You don't need me to tell you. You can read it various places, that there's obviously, on the part of a variety of military and a variety of civilians, great concern about how we left and what happened, and why did we just spend 20 years sacrificing everything for this to be the result? I think a lot of that's natural, given the stress and such, that the situation was in then.

Annie Henderson: I think you've touched on this a little bit, but I want to ground us a little bit more and then ask for a little bit wider view on this, which is, in July of 2021, President Biden said, and I'll quote here, "The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese Army. They're not remotely comparable, in terms of capability. There's going to be no circumstance where you're going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy."

Annie Henderson: I think he obviously came to regret that specific statement in comparison. After President Biden made those remarks, months later, the Taliban had conquered Kabul, and the Afghan President had fled the country, and we also had a suicide bomber kill 180 people, including American service members outside of Kabul's airport. So, I'm really curious, why was there such a large difference between the public expectation for the withdrawal and what actually happened, as someone who's sat advising the people who are making these decisions. I'm really curious, in your mind, where do you think some of those differences came from?

Carter Malkasian: It was always possible Afghanistan was going to unravel quickly. Afghanistan's history has a variety of occasions when, when the wind starts to blow one way, people try to ... groups shift in another direction. It's not entirely unique to Afghanistan. It just happens to be, we can look to immediate history and see some occasions of this in Afghan history, especially our advancement into Afghanistan in 2001, which the Taliban didn't put up much resistance. They just folded and went away. Depending on how we look at it, we can see it's even in the same amount of time that that all happened.

Carter Malkasian: So, this was always a possibility, that that could happen. It's hard to estimate the number of months or weeks in which something will happen like that. When you're looking at it, you have to consider okay, what are the things I think could happen for this to go to… that would make this go quickly? So, that's the Taliban are organized enough for, that they have enough logistics to move fast from place to place, that the government's Northern Alliance forces don't stand up, that no outside country gives greater assistance. These are some of the common things that are there, but you don't know. You don't know which way things could go, and you also don't know how much the Taliban would be inspired, or how much the government forces will be inspired.

Carter Malkasian: That should leave you, I think, if you're good to say, or if you're thinking broadly, to say, we don't know. There's a range of time in which this could happen, and I need to consider the different times in which this could happen, and the different things we might do for each of those. So, I guess you could say that that uncertainty is why President Biden said, "Well, no. It's not like that. It could be different."

Carter Malkasian: Another way to say this is, we can't predict the future, right? No one can predict the future. So, we shouldn't really expect politicians to do it. We shouldn't expect intel analysts to do it, as smart as they are, because it's an unrealistic thing to expect of someone. That's probably somewhat of a lesson from this. We have to think about, what's the broad range of ways this thing could work out, and are we ready for dealing with things, and have we laid out the indicators to see how it could change? What are the flashing red lights that we should be starting to see, that will make us say, "Okay, it's not going to fall in six months. It's going to fall in three months. It's not going to fall in three months. It's falling now." How do you start to translate that?

Reema Saleh: This might be an unrealistic question, but what conditions do you think would've been necessary to produce a better outcome?

Carter Malkasian: In Afghanistan?

Reema Saleh: Yes.

Carter Malkasian: That's a good question. It depends what you mean by outcome, but when we take something that would be realistic for an outcome, our realistic outcome for the war in Afghanistan was not winning. A realistic outcome for the war in Afghanistan would be something that lost fewer American lives, cost less money, and could've been managed better.

Carter Malkasian: So, what would've been needed to do that? Well, after defeating the Taliban, we shouldn't have been so overconfident. I mean, after toppling the regime in 2001, we shouldn't have been so overconfident. We should've thought that there's different ways history can play out, and one of them, for an insurgency, is that the insurgents return and form a threat.

Carter Malkasian: So, if we weren't overconfident, then we might've thought well, how can we deal with the Taliban? Can we negotiate with them now? Also, what kind of military forces do they need if they need to fight them? In a good world, that maybe would've prevented the war. In the much more likely world, it just would've made the war easier to manage, less costly.

Carter Malkasian: So, overconfidence there. Later on, take the surge. We probably shouldn't have surged. Why did we surge? Because we were so concerned about the threat from Afghanistan, and we cared so much about one option that we crowded out the other possible options that were there. President Obama should've had more options. One option could've been not to surge at all. Another option could've been to take away a few troops. I don't think you could've gotten all of them out.

Carter Malkasian: Another option could've been to surge a few troops. An option could've been well, don't decrease the numbers but stay long. You're going to have to stay long if you want to do any of these things. All of those things could've prevented a situation that would've lost fewer lives and cost less money, and a lot of those are related to our overconfidence, or not considering enough options, or not understanding that history… that the future's going to play out in different ways than you actually think it's going to play out.

Carter Malkasian: So, a lot of it gets down to the flexibility of one's strategy. A lot of it gets into: how overconfident are we? So, I think those are the things that I think we could've done differently to get to somewhere else.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Carter Malkasian. This episode was produced and edited by Reema Saleh and Ricardo Sande. Thank you to our interviewers, Annie Henderson and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.

Reema Saleh: Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: In this episode, Annie and I speak with Nina Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation and a global fellow at The Wilson Center. We talk about her debut book, How to Lose the Information War, which takes the reader through several case studies of how western governments are impacted by Russian disinformation tactics and how to navigate the future of conflict.

Reema Saleh: As a note, this episode was reported in November of 2021 before Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So, keep that in mind as you're listening. In the past month, we've seen misinformation and disinformation efforts ramp up. So, it's important to understand how these strategies work and what threats they pose. We also talk about her upcoming book, How to Be a Woman Online coming out April 21st on how to deal with gender harassment and abuse and online spaces.

Nina Jankowicz: My name is Nina Jankowicz. I'm a global fellow at the Wilson center, which is a nonprofit nonpartisan think tank here in Washington, D.C and I'm the author of How to Lose the Information War, which came out in 2020 and the forthcoming book, How to Be a Woman Online, which will be out in April of 2022.

Annie Henderson: Could you tell us a little bit about your first book?

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, so this book came out of my experience when I was a Fulbright public policy fellow in Ukraine. I was lucky enough to be advising the government of Ukraine, specifically the ministry of foreign affairs and the spokesperson there on strategic communications and counter disinformation efforts in 2016 and 2017, which as you can imagine was a pretty interesting time to be in Ukraine.

Nina Jankowicz:I kind of felt, especially as the United States woke up to the threat of Russian disinformation specifically, but just kind of information warfare or online influence more broadly that we approached the problem with a certain hubris that I found really distasteful, especially from my seat in Ukraine. It was as if we thought we were the first country, the first people to ever deal with this problem, when that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Nina Jankowicz:Central and Eastern Europe had been dealing with disinformation, especially of the Russian variety for decades and had been really familiar with this new iteration of Russian online disinformation. And so I thought it would be useful to policy makers, but also to normal people who want to follow the news to understand how this phenomenon developed in Central and Eastern Europe and what the government and civil society there had been doing to try to combat it where they won and where they made, unfortunately, a lot of missteps as we tried to chart our own course in countering disinformation.

Annie Henderson:How are you defining disinformation? As you talk through all these different topics, I just want to make sure that our listeners understand the term that you're using.

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, absolutely. I'll give you kind of the lay of the land as I see it, because these terms often get used interchangeably, which doesn't do the listener or the viewer really any good and frankly confuses a lot of people.

Nina Jankowicz:I use the definitions that First Draft News use. They're a great organization that focuses on how journalists and the media can identify and counter disinformation. And the definition they use for disinformation is, "False or misleading information used with malign intent." Now, that's different than misinformation, which is similarly false or misleading information, but it doesn't have that malign intent behind it. So, we're in the holiday season now. We're all going to be seeing our family soon.

Nina Jankowicz:We've all probably have that one family member who traffics in conspiracy theories. They're not necessarily sharing disinformation; they're just sharing their crazy theories because they think they're interesting or they might have something to them.

Nina Jankowicz:That's misinformation. That's all a little bit different than propaganda or fake news. I try not to use the term fake news in any academic writing. It is in the subtitle of my book, which is Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict. That was something that my publisher insisted on as a signpost for curious readers. But fake news doesn't really describe the full breadth of information operations that we tend to see in this realm.

Nina Jankowicz:Often, the most successful disinformation campaigns aren't necessarily fake. They're not false and fully fabricated. They are grounded in emotion or a kernel of truth. So, let's take the coronavirus as an example. A lot of the distrust of the vaccine or distrust of government initiatives to counter COVID comes from a deep-seated distrust of either institutions or institutional medicine. If you kind of pull back the layers with people who are in the anti-vaccination community, that's what you get at when you get to the root of the problem.

Nina Jankowicz:So, it's not fully fabricated, it's playing on something that's very real for those people. And then propaganda is often thrown into the mix as well, but propaganda has a different meaning at least to my ear and that is propaganda is a little bit more for political purposes. It serves to support or promote one political ideology.

Nina Jankowicz:If you look at what Russia has done particularly in the last 15 years or so, they have supported groups and spread disinformation on all sides of the political spectrum. Sometimes directly working in opposition to one another, just to create polarization. That's very different than the propaganda that we saw during the Soviet period, which promoted the Soviet worldview, Soviet ideology, et cetera.

Nina Jankowicz:It's a little bit more like what China is doing today, promoting the CCP and Chinese ideology and a positive interpretation of how China is viewed in the world. A little bit different. I wouldn't call what Russia does, propaganda, at least in the international realm.

Reema Saleh:What makes new forms of disinformation so difficult to combat?

Nina Jankowicz:Well, I think what's happening today. What we see today is the use of disinformation paired with the micro-targeting technology that social media platforms offer and that actors like Russia or some domestic political actors have become expert at using. This means that pretty much anybody with a social media account and an understanding of these platforms and how they work can target their messages at exactly the people who are going to be most vulnerable to them.

Nina Jankowicz:Sometimes you can do that with the assistance of ads, but more recently it's become really easy to segment populations or to identify vulnerable populations simply through things like Facebook pages and especially groups. We've also seen a lot happening on messengers lately. So, things like WhatsApp or Telegram where people self-select into certain groups or channels, and once you're in, you can certainly message and broadcast your views to a group of people where there's trust for your messaging and where there's a lot less content moderation, right?

Nina Jankowicz:Especially on those encrypted platforms, unless you're in the group, the platform themself is not going to have any oversight over what you're doing. It makes it very difficult to combat. And then again, outside of the technological question, we're also looking at narratives that are very, very deeply seated in people's human distrust of systems, of governments, of science sometimes and a lack of understanding in how nuanced most events in the world are.

Nina Jankowicz:Things aren't actually as black and white as we like to make them out to be sometimes. And because of a lack of media and information literacy along with all the technological and social factors that I mentioned before, we kind of have this perfect informational storm, so to speak.

Reema Saleh:What misperceptions do people have about modern disinformation campaign?

Nina Jankowicz:I think the biggest one is that these are just silly cut and dry, false things that trolls on the internet make and they have no real-world implications. As I said before, these traffic and emotion and often they do drive people to take offline action. As we saw around the January 6th insurrection and a number of events during the COVID pandemic, the Reopen Movement and other protests that have inspired violence or threats to public safety. I think that's something that a lot of disinformation researchers have been warning about for a long time, because we've seen it happen in other countries. Again, the United States and a few other Western nations have approached the problem with such hubris that we thought our institutions are strong enough, we're going to be able to withstand this without the types of offline effects that we've seen in other countries.

Nina Jankowicz:And that's just been proven not to be true. There are two other kinds of demographic misconceptions that people have about disinformation. One, is that young people are going to be more susceptible to it because they use the internet more. What we actually find through a lot of data is that young people are a lot savvier about how they get their information. They understand that when they're watching their TikTok for-you-page, that that is not being generated organically, that the algorithm knows them and is sending them the content they're most likely to interact with and be engaged with and stay on the platform for and they recognize that and know how to navigate those platforms a lot better than let's say their grandparents do.

Nina Jankowicz:It's actually the boomers end up that have the most problems with information literacy. They're used to having a gatekeeper for their information. Having watched the nightly news for so many years and don't really fully grasp that on their Facebook pages or Twitter timelines, I doubt many of them are on TikTok, but if they are, that that is an especially curated stream of information, that's targeting them individually.

Nina Jankowicz:That is something that unfortunately, we have a lot to contend with and that population is voting more reliably than the younger folks as well who may not even have the right to vote yet. That's one demographic misconception. And then another one is that we often think that disinformation only targets folks on the right of the political spectrum and there are a lot of examples, especially from Russia in which disinformation targeted folks on the left. It's less frequent, but it does happen, and it doesn't mean that just because you're a registered Democrat or whatever, that you're immune from disinformation. You still need to take the same precautions online as folks on the other side of the political spectrum.

Annie Henderson:You talked a little bit about how disinformation is different than propaganda. I'm curious about where the modern concept of disinformation started. Is it really an internet age invention or does it have roots earlier than that?

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, so Russia used disinformation during the Soviet period as well. Thomas Rid has a great book about Soviet era disinformation campaigns called Active Measures that I would highly recommend to anybody who's looking at it.

Nina Jankowicz:But in terms of our modern understanding of disinformation, certainly that began, I would say in the mid-2000s as the social media sphere was becoming more ubiquitous. A lot of the techniques that we see Russia using in particular, are holdovers though from the Soviet era. As Rid describes in his book, using these preexisting fishers and hot button issues and disagreements in society to further polarize, to further turn different sectors of society against one another, in order to gain political leverage is something that Russia has been doing since the Soviet period, since the early Soviet period we could say. I've been reminded by policy makers before that disinformation has long existed.

Nina Jankowicz:It's just a bit of a horse of a different color when it can travel as fast and as far and be as precisely targeted as it is with social media, with the platforms that we have today, where things can go viral in an instant and change our perception of events and make it very difficult to fact check or debunk after the fact in a way different than it would've been if newspapers were the ones being considered.

Nina Jankowicz:The famous example of Soviet disinformation campaigns that we often talk about is the Soviet operation to convince the world that aids was an American invention and that actually did gain some purchase, but it took a lot longer than it would have in the internet age because they had to launder their information through different print media and it took much longer to target certain populations abroad, especially and it was much, much more connected with kind of covert operations than the things that we see today, where a lot of these campaigns are kind of farmed out to different non-state actors like the Internet Research Agency, for instance.

Nina Jankowicz:So, disinformation as a concept has been around for a while. The Russian variety has some certain hallmarks to it and certainly is buoyed by the technology that's available today.

Reema Saleh:You compare the United States approach to tackling disinformation, to playing a game of whac-a-mole. Can you explain what you mean by this?

Nina Jankowicz:Sure. I actually call it whac-a-troll because I think that's kind of funny. But what I think we have been focused on basically since the very beginning when we figured out that Russia was attempting to influence the elections is removing fake accounts and posts that are harmful. There's been a lot of focus on that during the COVID pandemic as well.

Nina Jankowicz:But it's not a very systematic approach. It means that we are constantly on the back foot, constantly reactive, and it also means that essentially, we're always going to be chasing after these inauthentic actors who really have no reason not to continue to create fake accounts, not to continue to put out misleading information because the cost is very, very low for them. It takes much, much more effort to identify these fake accounts and identify the harmful posts than it does to create them.

Nina Jankowicz:And so, while it is important to put pressure on the social media platforms, I'm not making excuses for them here to make sure that they're identifying that content as quickly as possible and removing what it goes against their terms of service. But we also need to think more holistically. So, like how can we dis-incentivize actors like Russia from creating this content in the first place? thinking about that. Not that I think punitive measures are the end all, be all. These operations cost very little for Russia and for other countries.

Nina Jankowicz:So that is part of the toolkit, but not the panacea. We also need to think about how to educate our populations so that they're going to fall for these things less. There was such a debate. It feels like a long time ago now, but for most of the Trump administration, there is a big disagreement in Washington as to whether Russian disinformation was something we should worry about or not or whether it even happened.

Nina Jankowicz:It did happen. There's plenty of open-source evidence to that fact. And it certainly bothers me that an adversarial nation was attempting to influence our electoral discourse and I hope that any voting American would agree that that's not something that we should be okay with.

Nina Jankowicz:Instead, we just kind of looked at our shoes and allowed the hole that we're in to get even deeper. So rather than thinking about those generational ideas, those generational investments that we need to make that countries like Ukraine or Estonia or Finland in Sweden have been making, been in the case of Finland and Sweden, for generations in the case of Estonia and Ukraine for less time, but certainly making a large impact, we've been and cool in our heels. I think that is really, really unfortunate. And instead creating all this hubbub about removing content when that's only part of the solution.

Annie Henderson:Speaking of these other countries, I love how in your book, you don't just talk about the US, you talk about how a variety of countries are addressing the disinformation problem. I'm curious, do you see one approach emerging as the best in class? The gold standard for managing disinformation?

Nina Jankowicz:The best approaches all have things that are in common. I think of the countries that I look at in my book, which are Estonia, Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, Estonia has of course the privilege of being the first that Russia hit with some of these campaigns way back in 2007. They've got hindsight. They have really developed some systems that are quite robust, and their systems not only look at internet security, as we've probably all heard about. I'm sure this is very erudite audience, Estonian votes online. They have a lot of their government services online.

Nina Jankowicz:As a result, they're quite the leaders in cybersecurity in the trans all into community, but it's not just about hermetically sealing their online space. They've got an ethnic fisher that Russia likes to exploit, with the ethnic Russian population in Estonia. That was what led to the Bronze Soldier Crisis in 2007, in which a monument was moved and Russia through its media and some covert operations instigated protests in the center of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.

Nina Jankowicz:I think as early on, Estonia realized that it wasn't going to just be these cyber operations or cybersecurity that protected it. They needed to address the elephant in the room. And in that case, it was integration of the Russian speaking ethnic Russian population in their country. And so along with all of their cyber measures, which are, again, some of the best in the world, they also invested in integration through education, through Russian classes for Estonian language for Russian speakers through other kind of cultural and investment opportunities for Russian speaking areas.

Nina Jankowicz:If you look at the integration statistics, things are really changing in Estonia. A lot of the younger ethnic Russians and Russian speakers are adopting an Estonia identity that isn't grounded just in culture or Estonia language. It's grounded in this kind of new Europeanness and being a digital leader in the EU, this sort of thing.

Nina Jankowicz:It seems to be really, really taking off. Is it perfect? No, very, very famously Estonia has had a couple of far-right politicians be elected to their parliament recently. So, watch that space, but certainly they seem to be doing a little bit better than many other countries. Now, they are a country of 1.3 million and people and have fewer societal fishers for countries like Russia to exploit. But if plucky little Estonia can do it, I am not sure why larger countries can't take another holistic approach with the resources that we have, let's say here in the United States to counter such operations that we're getting hit with pretty constantly at this point.

Annie Henderson:As you go through and talk about how each of these different countries handle their disinformation problems, do you think that that's the right approach? Should it be country by country or should there be any kind of international coordination? If you do think that there should be some international coordination, what should it look like?

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, I think there is a unique problem for each country to solve. The campaign that Estonia was met with and continues to fight is going to very intrinsically look different than what's going on in the United States or the UK or Germany.

Nina Jankowicz:Russia is extremely good at identifying the unique weaknesses and vulnerabilities that each country has. That being said, we can always stand for more international coordination. There have been some nascent attempts at creating body that will share information and attempt to coordinate responses to disinformation crises that cross borders in particular.

Nina Jankowicz:One that was really quite successful, I would say is the response to Skripal poisoning in the UK in 2018. I think it was 2018 in which Russia, very famously used Novichok to poison a former spy who was living in the UK, Sergei, Skripal. As a result, when that operation was uncovered, the international community came together not only to expel Russian diplomats as a punishment for this egregious violation of UK sovereignty, but the UK government also shared and declassified very quickly, the intelligence that allowed them to say without a shadow of a doubt that this was the work of Russian intelligence operatives.

Nina Jankowicz:That was shared not only across governments, but with media, with experts who gave credibility to that message. I think in my perspective, that was a really successful international coordination operation. Not every disinformation incident can rise to that level, of course. But I do think there are moments where international coordination, particularly in terms of punitive measures can be extremely successful, but we haven't seen a lot of success in that area and unfortunately have seen more duplication than I would prefer.

Annie Henderson:One of the things that I love about your book is that you don't just talk about what's happening online. You also talk about how disinformation can kind of reach out the internet and have real monetary impact either through lobbying or the direct funding of groups or even just as a business for PR consulting firms who specifically focus on disinformation. What can be done about that? those actions that are happening outside of just online platforms.

Nina Jankowicz:So, this is another misconception maybe that I should have mentioned before. We think of disinformation as something that's just about online memes, but really there is a lot of offline action from the funding of these groups, as you've just mentioned to different political manifestations and unfortunately, this is where we get into kind of the murky area of anti-corruption reform.

Nina Jankowicz:This is something that I think we are going to see the Biden administration focusing on a lot more. It has been a priority for them. It's something that we really need our allies to help with as well, to uncover these networks and make sure that dirty money isn't moving around and funding these operations.

Nina Jankowicz:But if you look at Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senator from Rhode Island, if I've got that right, I'm pretty sure I do. He's very focused on anti-corruption. I did a hearing with the Senate judiciary committee in 2018, and that was his main thrust, that if we shut down the networks, the financial networks, through which these campaigns are funded, they won't be able to go on anymore. That's very true in the Russian case. With PR firms, it's a little bit different in that their clients are trying to distance themselves and they're often political actors trying to distance themselves from the disinformation and having somebody else do the dirty work.

Nina Jankowicz:We've also seen Russia do this recently, either the internet research agency or other oligarchs are buying services from PR firms, let's say in Ghana, which Clarissa Ward very famously uncovered in a recent investigation for CNN.

Nina Jankowicz:Again, that's not necessarily illegal. It just makes it a little bit more difficult to uncover these operations when the time comes. Now, the social media platforms actually for their part have cracked down on those operations, those PR disinformation or as some people like to say, disinformation for profit operations because they're quite misleading in their providence. And so, they feel that it goes against their terms of service. So that's one way that we're cracking down when there isn't illicit financial flows involved.

Reema Saleh:Disinformation doesn't just come from foreign actors. You write a lot about out how there's a rise in domestic disinformation actors and how they can be sort of amplified without knowing it. Should efforts to combat disinformation change depending on who is perpetuating that disinformation?

Nina Jankowicz:Absolutely. I think for too long in the United States, we have viewed disinformation as just a foreign problem while we are ignoring the problem underneath our noses. We have seen major political parties in the United States and high-level elected officials engaging in disinformation. Unfortunately, we don't have domestic regulations dealing with disinformation. We can point to different federal election codes and say, "Okay. Russia can't buy ads on Facebook in support of one candidate or another."

Nina Jankowicz:That's easy enough to say. But when it comes to disinformation that's coming from domestic figures online, it becomes very, very difficult to really clamp down on. We have rules governing advertising in print, on radio, on TV for elections, but when it comes to online ads, we don’t, and Facebook and other online advertisers and advertising marketplaces have been reticent to be the "arbiter" of truth for political ads.

Nina Jankowicz:Instead, saying this is free speech, it's in the public interest for people to see these lies. We've seen where that leads. It leads to insurrections that attempt to overthrow election results. I think we really need to get our federal regulations into place for this sort of stuff, especially because we have seen a proliferation of disinformation over the past 18 months that has not only affected our democracy, it's affected public health and public safety. We have to recognize that the longer we allow this wound to fester, not only do we create a bigger problem for ourselves at home, but that means that we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to foreign interference as well.

Nina Jankowicz:Because as you mentioned, we see foreign actors who identify these vulnerable individuals or people who are trafficking in disinformation, and they use them to launder their own disinformation into the American ecosystem. A great example of this from 2020 was Rudy Giuliani. As the director of national intelligence stated in their report on the 2020 election, which came out in March, I believe of 2021, it's pretty likely the IC assesses that Russian intelligence operatives fed Rudy Giuliani his "intel" on the Biden family. It was either fabricated or stolen. That was all with the express intent of manipulating American voters and using Giuliani to launder that information as a trusted conduit into the American ecosystem.

Nina Jankowicz:We have to think about this stuff. We need better awareness built about it. We need more rules about how campaigning can work with contributions from foreign governments and how that can be amplified online. Without even the foreign question in play, we need to discuss whether disinformation and just bold face lies that can affect public safety and public health can be amplified on the internet. I think there is a way to do that without endangering freedom of expression, if we keep it in an electoral atmosphere.

Reema Saleh:What are the steps that we in the US need to be taking in the long term? What institutions need to be most involved or held accountable?

Nina Jankowicz:So, I think the biggest thing on my agenda, if I were in the Biden administration right now would be empowering an office or a team of individuals to make sure that they are the kind of linchpin of US government policy to counter disinformation in the US government. Right now, we don't have that.

Nina Jankowicz:A lot of the institutions that are focused on counter disinformation activities are either within the intelligence community, within DOD, within the state department. They're not necessarily talking to each other all of the time. The coordination thing is always not necessarily the US government's strong suit, but more importantly, we don't really see involvement from institutions that are on the domestic side of things. I would love to see the department of education, the department of health and human services, housing and urban development, the national endowment for humanities, all of those and more involved in the counter disinformation question in the US government, because as we've just talked about, the domestic disinformation side of things is where it's all happening right now.

Nina Jankowicz:And if we're just playing defense outside of our borders, we're going to be missing a huge part of the game. I think that's the first step. And then we need to look at these really holistic. I hate to say it whole of government, because that's such a buzzword now, but whole of government policies where we are seeing really substantial coordination across government, where we're seeing an investment in generational activities like information literacy, where we're really trying to build up trust back in these institutions that has withered away over so long.

Nina Jankowicz:I think all of that is really important. Right now, we're kind of like a bunch of different hamsters spinning in our wheel, our own individual wheels. Are we powering a light bulb together? Yeah. But could that light be a lot stronger if we were working more in concert if we were all running on one giant wheel? Yes, I think so. And so that's the thing that I think is most important that we've seen governments like the UK do like Estonia, to some extent like Ukraine, although they have some kind of Soviet vestiges to recover from in their own government outlook and infrastructure, but that's the biggest thing on the agenda. So far, we've not seen that come out of the Biden administration.

Annie Henderson:Before this podcast, Reema and I were really excited to ask you about libraries and other offline in institutions of knowledge and what they can do to help combat disinformation, whether it be online or through these other avenues, like you've spoken about.

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, I'm really excited you brought that up. I really believe in libraries. I think they are just a great resource for the United States and other countries where they've been employed in the counter disinformation fight because they're so highly trusted. Librarians are among the most trusted individuals, even still today across political parties. What I would love to see is either through state-level funding or federal-level funding, see grants go out to libraries who can host information, literacy classes, especially directed at seniors. Right? People who might need to have a little help for how to FaceTime their grandchildren, but you can also throw in some media and information literacy into that training that you're doing with them.

Nina Jankowicz:Also, when you have circle time with a bunch of kindergartners in the kids section of the library, let's also educate them about advertising and how it's targeting them. All of that sort of stuff is things that are allies like Sweden, like Finland, like Ukraine and Estonia are doing and it is delivered by a trusted mechanism. Again, somebody that knows their community, somebody that is seen as impartial, someone whose job people view it as to navigate information environments.

Nina Jankowicz:I think that's so critical because if we do like a bumbling kind of top-down US government propaganda campaign about information literacy, everybody's just going to laugh at it. Historically, we're not very good at those sorts of things. I would rather hand it over to the experts. Librarians, civil society, organizations that have deep roots in their community and let them be the conduits of that information, give them the funding and the space that they need to do it.

Nina Jankowicz:Make it a priority and I think we'll see great results. In Ukraine, they had a similar program that was funded in part by the US government, the UK government in Canada and they saw such growth in people's understanding of the information environment. They were able to train 10,000 librarians who then went and trained, I think another 80,000-90,000 people in their own regions back home. This program is still going on today, I think both at libraries and in secondary schools in Ukraine.

Nina Jankowicz:If Ukraine can do it, smaller country than us, but still quite a large country, one of the largest in Europe, I think the United States should be able to implement a similar program to great success as well.

Reema Saleh:Misinformation often runs on kind of anger or existing tensions in our society and social media does as well. Like I'm more likely to see a post if it elicits a really strong reaction from me. What should we do when we receive this kind of information and how do we parse through it when a lot of it seems organic or homegrown?

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah. That's an excellent question. I'll preface my answer by saying it's fine to be emotional. Let's just make sure our emotions are grounded in something real, not something that's spun up by a political operative or by foreign adversary. Right? When I am counseling people on kind of how to navigate the online environment, I try to remind people that the most engaging content online as you pointed out, is often the most enraging content.

Nina Jankowicz:And as we've seen from the Facebook papers, which have been and trickling out over the last couple of weeks, that is certainly true on Facebook. And I don't think they're the only social media platform that traffics in outrage. That being said, when you see this content, when you feel yourself really getting emotional about something you see online, stop for a second. Practice what I call informational distancing, which was something that I started advising people to practice at the beginning of the pandemic and consider why you're feeling so upset.

Nina Jankowicz:Is this something that is based in fact? Do you know the source? If you don't know the source, do a little bit of research. If this is a publication or a Facebook page or group, see what's behind it. See who's behind it. Do they have contact information? Is this a real person or a journalist who's published this post? If you can, do a reverse image search on their profile picture or Twitter picture to see if it brings you to an organic picture, or if it's something that's been edited or misappropriated.

Nina Jankowicz:A lot of times I can identify fake accounts because I do a reverse image search and it'll bring me to like stock haircut photos. That's a great way to do it. And then also, when we're talking about breaking news and things like that, see if anybody else is reporting what is causing you this emotional configuration in a different way.

Nina Jankowicz:Is a mainstream outlet reporting the facts the same way? Is there an outlet on the other side of the political spectrum, that's reporting the same details? Just do a little bit of crosschecking or what Michael Cofield, who's at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public calls lateral reading. Looking across the internet to see like, is this true? Is it being reported the same way elsewhere? Just getting yourself a little bit more context because there are so many manipulative people and outlets online.

Nina Jankowicz:When you do that, you're going to be more informed anyway. It's a bit like writing a book report, when we were taught to do this back in elementary school, you weren't allowed to just use one source. You need to kind of consider all sides of the equation before you come to a conclusion. If you find that there has been, let's say, an incident of police brutality and everybody is reporting this the same way, you've been able to confirm the facts across multiple outlets, you know they're coming from a verified reporter on the ground, if you're interested, you can even go a little bit deeper and do some open source investigation and try to confirm where a live video was shot, things like this.

Nina Jankowicz:That's a little bit more skilled than we have time to go into today, but people do that. That's how you get information that is grounded. In fact, you remove the emotion from your initial reaction, and you are just thinking about what is true to inform your opinion. And then you can go forth and use that to fuel your activism, use that to fuel your interjection into the online discourse. But it's so important that we take those few extra steps and I've probably spent more time talking about it than it would take you. It's just a couple of quick Google searches and a couple of deep breaths before we click share. And that matters so much. We're kind of the front lines of the information warrant.

Annie Henderson:We've spoken a lot about your first book and I'm personally very excited to hear about your second book as well, which is called How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back. Specifically, I'm curious if you see a connection between the harassment women face online and some of these broader disinformation campaigns that we covered and that you've covered at length in your first book.

Nina Jankowicz:Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that's how I got into the whole gendered harassment space. I am a woman online, so I get this stuff myself, but it really started becoming an issue I cared even more about when I heard from interviewees during my first book, women in Georgia and Ukraine who had been the victims of targeted gendered disinformation campaigns coming from the Kremlin.

Nina Jankowicz:That's when I really started thinking about okay, we've heard a lot about how, how disinformation affects marginalized communities or different ethnic groups, but we really haven't heard about how it affects women. It was clear to me looking at like the Russian ads in 2016, that actually Russia was quite misogynist in its treatment of Hillary Clinton. The way that Russia had treated during the Obama administration let's say Jen Psaki who's now, of course, the white house press secretary, extremely misogynist. Russia doesn't have a great track record with feminism in general in its own domestic policy.

Nina Jankowicz:So, I started thinking about this more and I was lucky enough to do some research at the Wilson Center earlier this year with a great group of researchers that looked into not only the quantitative background of how women are treated online. We followed 13 candidates for office in the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Canada over a period of two months at the end of 2020 and found a staggering amount of gendered abuse and disinformation against them. I think something like 330, 6,000 pieces of content.

Nina Jankowicz:78% of which was directed at vice president, well at that point, candidate Kamala Harris. So really just truly, truly staggering amounts of hate. But we also saw through some structured interviews that we did with journalists and other women in the public eye, a very specific and deliberate use of gendered and sexualized tropes against women who were covering Russia, Iran, and China.

Nina Jankowicz:For me, this isn't just an issue of I'm a woman and people think it is part of my job just to endure this hatred online, which is bad enough, but it's also that the longer that we let this fester, it becomes a national security problem, right? We're in the age of deep fakes and most of the deep fakes that exist today, over 90% or 95% even are deep fake pornography. It's only a matter of time before convincing deep fake porn video is released of someone like AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) or Kamala Harris or someone else.

Nina Jankowicz:We really, really need to get a handle on this, and the platforms don't do anything about it. There's no protections for women in our legal code. Law enforcement don't know what to do when they're presented with claims of cyber stalking or cyber harassment. It has an effect on you.

Nina Jankowicz:As somebody who's gone through this stuff myself, it makes it almost impossible to do your work and in the book and you know, I've used this analogy in real life too, because people don't understand how much it affects you, I compare it to, let's say you were walking down the street and suddenly there was a swarm of people, mostly men picking apart every part of your appearance, reducing your degree and all your hard work to your gender, telling you to get back in the kitchen, telling you to make babies and stuff that I can't say on this podcast, that would be something that we wouldn't tolerate. We'd take out a restraining order. The police would help you.

Nina Jankowicz:Online, we don't have that protection. Instead, as the internet has really even more so during the pandemic become an extension of ourselves, particularly for people who have a large online presence, journalists, academics, et cetera. It's just debilitating to undergo this stuff.

Nina Jankowicz:Women are just expected to endure it. "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen." That's something my trolls have said to me before. So, I'm trying to change that. I do think that this is very, very closely aligned to the disinformation campaigns that we see both coming from foreign actors and domestic actors.

Nina Jankowicz:Just this week as we're taping this podcast, we saw representative Paul Gosar sharing cheap fake of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were face plastered down an anime character's body, which then he proceeds to kill. I would say that is gendered abuse and disinformation. This is something unfortunately that I think is only going to become more and more common as we have more and more women in public life. I do not want it to affect the participation of my future children in public life.

Nina Jankowicz:I don't want them to look at my Twitter replies or look at Kamala Harris' Twitter replies and see shocking things and say, "You know what? I'm not going to run for public office. I'm not going to put myself out there." We need women in the conversation. And that goes doubly so for women of color and women of marginalized backgrounds who receive even more abuse than their white peers do.

Reema Saleh:I was genuinely surprised when that Twitter video wasn't taken down. How should platforms be responding to gender disinformation and harassment? What should policymakers be doing?

Nina Jankowicz:There's so much. The platforms have gotten ever so slightly better or a little more attentive over the past couple of months since our first report came out and I will say they have been at least willing to listen to the critiques we have for them. But right now, the biggest problem is that the onus of detecting and reporting and dealing with the harassment is on the target of those being harassed. It's on women. It should be the platform's job to protect their users from harassment and abuse.

Nina Jankowicz:Twitter has just introduced safety mode, which I think is an improvement. It's essentially something that will auto block people from your replies, who are using nasty language for as long as you like if you're undergoing like a trolling campaign. But again, the onus is on the user.

Nina Jankowicz:What I would like to see is more proactive detection of this content. If we were able to find 336,000 pieces of gender abuse and disinformation over a two-month period, attacking 13 different women, imagine what the platforms can find if they just put together a list of classifiers that they are updating fairly frequently.

Nina Jankowicz:In addition to that, we need to see consequences for those who are using this type of abuse. Right now, they just get a slap on the risk. They might get their account suspended. They might be asked to delete the offending tweet. Very rarely are they kicked off the platform, particularly if they are a large follower account that is essentially sending dog whistles to their followers to go and harass someone which has happened to me and happens to a lot of people. Those instigating accounts never have any consequence. So, there's a lot for platforms to be doing more proactively to protect women.

Nina Jankowicz:There's a reason that on Reddit, on Twitter, women make up less than half of the online population. It's because we are dealing with so much more abuse. On the platform side, I would just say they really just need to enforce their terms of service. All of the thing that I've mentioned are things that go against terms of service, and we don't see them taken care of. That's number one.

Nina Jankowicz:And then policy makers, I think there is some attention to this problem, particularly among women politicians, Jackie Speier of California is very, very interested in these issues. And we've spoken with a number of other members of congress as well. The problem is anything that has to do with gender becomes a polarizing issue in this Congress in particular. The violence against women act still hasn't been renewed.

Nina Jankowicz:I think there are some provisions being discussed in BAWA to add support for women who have undergone online harassment and perhaps to equip law enforcement with training and tools that they need to deal with some of these claims. But unfortunately, I think anything that Congress is able to pass, that's going to help normal people, isn't going to be implemented for a couple of years.

Nina Jankowicz:So, in the meantime, we really need the platforms to step up again. The one other thing that I would love to see introduced in the House and Senate individually and then in other parliamentary bodies around the world is rules for people who are sharing gendered abuse. So, for the representative Gosars or others, if they're sharing this sort of abuse or violent abuse from their official accounts, they need to be censored. There needs to be a consequence for those who are engaging in this sort of behavior to their colleagues.

Nina Jankowicz:This is supposed to be a civil deliberative institution and it's not supposed to be somewhere where people have to deal with violent threats from people they go to work with. Make no mistake, the idea there, again, isn't just to silence Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the interim, it's to send a message to all women, especially women of color or progressive women that they're not welcome in those spaces.

Nina Jankowicz:That is just unacceptable. So, I hope to see something like that introduced at least in the house sometimes soon as a result of what we've seen this week, but we've seen other issues that have met no resistance from the house rules committee or others. Just a few ideas. There's more in our report, malign creativity, which you can find on the Wilson Center website.

Annie Henderson:I think you've already answered this for online harassment that women face. But what are some of your big takeaways for policymakers when you're talking to them about disinformation more generally? You obviously speak to policymakers about this topic. What are your big points that you really need them to understand and take back with them?

Nina Jankowicz:The one that I repeat over and over, and I still think, unfortunately, is not heard by some politicians is that disinformation is not a partisan problem. It's a democratic problem. It doesn't matter what political party is being helped in the interim by disinformation. It might help your party today, but it might come to attack you tomorrow. It really is going to affect all of us. It's going to affect faith in the democratic system as we've already seen. It takes years to recover from something like that. I have served on election observation missions in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, where there is this deep-seated distrust of the electoral system because of legitimate fraud that existed there for many years. And so, I often think about in the wake of January 6th in the #StopTheSteal movement, how many people go to the ballot box now and don't trust that their vote is being counted?

Nina Jankowicz:I really do worry about that. It's not just our democracy that suffers, but as I've been saying the whole time, our public safety and public health, these institutions are important to the functioning of our society, to the peace and prosperity of the United States. It's ultimately extremely a selfish to say, "It's okay." When disinformation happens, as long as it's not affecting me.

Nina Jankowicz:If any policy makers are listening out there, remember the ultimate victim of disinformation is our democracy and people's participation in it. And without that participation, you're not going to get elected and the system isn't going to function anymore.

Nina Jankowicz:And that's the biggest takeaway for me and something that I find myself again, repeating every time testifying on the Hill or briefing policymaker, otherwise.

Reema Saleh:Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Nina Jankowicz. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh.

Annie Henderson:Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema, and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.

Reema Saleh: Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Reema Saleh: In this episode, Deqa and I speak with Steve Killelea, a global philanthropist focused on peace and sustainable development. He's the founder of the Institute for Economics and Peace and the Global Peace Index, which measures and ranks the peacefulness of 163 different countries around the world. We talk about his recent book, Peace in the Age of Chaos, and how we can build more peaceful, resilient societies.

Steve Killelea: Peace in the Age of Chaos, it covers a number of different themes. The first is the personal journey to peace. Does it really happen by accident? Secondarily, it covers an entrepreneurial story on how you go about developing a world class think tank. And then finally it talks about the state of global peace, and then also describes a concept called positive peace, which is the attitudes, institutions, and structures which create and sustain peaceful societies, combines that with systems thinking to then come up with a transformational concept for how we could go about better running our societies.

Steve Killelea: But really, if I look back on it, peace to me happened by accident. So, my background's in business, I've set up two international IT companies. First one ended up publicly listed on NASDAQ, second on the Australian stock exchange. From that I accumulated quite a bit of money.

Steve Killelea: And so I set up a family foundation to work with the poorest of the poor. And so it's done a bit over 220 different projects down different parts of the world and direct beneficiaries about 3.6 million people. And so, working with the poorest, the poor took me into a lot of war zones, near post-war zones. And it would've been northeast Kivu in the Congo, I was walking through there one day and I suddenly wondered what is the opposite of all these stressed out countries I'm spending time in? What are the most peaceful countries and what could I learn from them to bring to my projects?

Steve Killelea: And really it was a fantasy question. We all have these fantasy questions. But what was profound, so I got back to Sydney, searched the internet, and couldn't find any rankings, the countries of the world by their peacefulness. I thought, wow, that's important. So, that's how the Global Peace Index was born. But out of that comes a really very, very profound question and profound realization: Is that a simple business guy like myself can be walking through Africa and wonder, what are the most peaceful nations, and it hasn't been done, and how much do we know about peace? If you can't measure something, can you truly understand it? If you can't measure it, how do you know whether your actions are actually helping you or hindering you?

Deqa Aden: You touched a little bit about positive peace. My question for you is what is negative peace and why is it important for us to distinguish positive peace from negative peace?

Steve Killelea: Yeah, that's a very good question. But I think the question coming back from that is what is peace? And so peace means different things to different people. So, you can hear a politician speak and peace is when the war stops, but that doesn't mean that you've actually got a peaceful society. You've just got one where you haven't got two armies fighting. There's also the concept of inner peace. And so inner peace may be described as the absence of conflictive emotions, certainly the concepts in the East of inner peace, of what they would call happiness, which is very different than the Western concept of happiness.

Steve Killelea: So for me, peace and the definition used for peace is relative to what you're trying to achieve. So, you think, well, what aspect of peace am I trying to understand here? And then you look at a definition to match.

Steve Killelea: So now, if we look at the Global Peace Index, we use the definition called the absence of violence or fear of violence as the definition of peace. And that's what you could call negative peace. Now it's very, very good. It's a definition just about everyone can agree on. You don't get too much argument. And it's something which leads to being able to get metrics to be able to measure peace. So, if you look at the Global Peace Index, it's got three different domains. So, it's got internal safety and security, maybe things like homicide rates, violent crime, terrorist acts, number of police, number of people in jail, etc., ongoing conflict and militarization. So, you can measure them. Now that's very, very good because now you know the state of peace. You know the state of peace with all the countries you're measuring – in our case, it's 163.

Steve Killelea: And then you also understand the velocity of peace in those countries. Is it improving or is it getting worse? And along a whole range of dimensions. So, that's truly, truly insightful. But what it doesn't do is tell you what it takes to create a peaceful society. Now that is what positive peace is. So, that's positive peace. And so we describe that as the attitude, institutions, and structures which create and sustain peaceful societies.

Steve Killelea: Now what sets that apart from the work of other people working in these fields is we've derived this through mathematical modeling and statistics. So, we've got something like 50,000 different data sets, indexes, attitudinal surveys at the country level in Sydney. So, what we do is mathematical modeling, statistical analysis against those data sets to find out the factors which are most closely associated with the Global Peace Index. And so those factors then, we take them, we do further analysis to be able to clump the ones which are most statistically significant together, that then forms a framework, or it's eight pillars, of positive peace.

Steve Killelea: Now the beauty of that is, one, it's not my ideas on what creates peace or the researchers’ ideas on what creates peace. It's factually driven within a positive peace index and not set by us. They're dependent on the way, on the strength of the correlations with the Global Peace Index. Now, as we pull that all together, we can now create a positive peace index and that's really quite profound because that now gives us the ability to be able to look at how a country's momentum's changing on the factors underlying what creates peace.

Steve Killelea: But what's more profound is what we found is when we took this Positive Peace Index, the same factors, which create peace, also create a whole range of other things which we think are really important in society. Such as high per capita income. In fact, countries which are improving in positive peace on average have 2% per annum higher GDP growth rate than countries which are decreasing. Perform better on measures of ecological sustainability, perform better on measures of your wellbeing and happiness and on measures of inclusion.

Steve Killelea: So, from that, what we derived is that positive peace, in many ways, describes an optimal environment in which human potential can flourish. And that's quite important. We then take the positive peace and then combine it with a whole set of systems, thinking, and theory to better understand the way societies operate. And that is when we start to get looking at the transformational way, Western governments and societies, about how we go about doing societal development.

Reema Saleh: Can you talk a little bit more about the Global Peace Index and the methodology in scoring countries?

Steve Killelea: Sure. So, if we look at the Global Peace index, as mentioned earlier on consists of three different domains, first one's safety and security, the second is ongoing conflict, and the third is militarization. So, we bring these together to create these three dimensions to create a compass and index. Consists of 23 different measures. We have an expert panel that looks at the indicators and assesses them and makes recommendations on what indicators we should and shouldn't include. And the index itself has been slowly evolving over time. Having the three different domains, you can take all of it as composite index and see what's happening and where the changes are or alternatively, you take each of the domains separately and see the momentum and direction of them. So, one of the more fascinating things which comes out of it is if we look back over the last decade, more countries have actually improved in peace than deteriorated. Most people wouldn't believe that, would they?

Steve Killelea: In fact, we've had 86 countries improve and 75 deteriorate. However, peace globally actually deteriorated over that time. And that speaks simply because when countries fall in peace, they fall faster than they improve. Takes a lot longer to improve in peace. You need the outbreak of the conflict or something, and it really drops significantly. So, if we come back and we look at, let's say domains like safety and security, it consists of a number of different measures, which are able to balance each other out. So, some of the things would be, let's say, the number of police, the levels of incarceration, levels of violent crime and homicide. And all those come together. So, if you have a police state, let's say a spy in every 10,000, it'd be really quite peaceful in terms of violent crime. But on the other hand, it's not a very peaceful place to live. So we look at the level of policing, the level of incarceration, and the level of violent crime. We also got the availability of small arms within the society. That's also a negative. We also measure the number of violent demonstrations, let's say, and a number of other measures. State-sponsored terror on its citizens, that'd be another measure which we have in there as well. So that's the safety and security. So that's really focusing on the internal.

Steve Killelea: Now militarization, that consists of a number of different indicators. So it's like percentage of GDP spent on the military, number of troops per 100,000 people in the population, sophistication of the weapons – countries with nuclear weapons score the worst possible score on that. And then the size of the imports and exports of military equipment as well.

Steve Killelea: And now, so if you look at the definition which we use for the Global Peace Index, absence of violence or fear of violence. So some people would say, well, the military keeps the peace. In some ways, that's a very, very true statement, but why do you have a military? It's, one, because you fear your neighbors and that you need to protect yourself against them. So that's fear of violence. Alternatively, you really do have to keep yourself safe or that you want the military to exert geopolitical influence. And that comes back to the use of the military for a country's own advantage. So that's the reason the military's in there. And so we're neutral on the military in terms of what the size of the military should be. Obviously, we don't live in a peaceful world. We need military, but the size of the military really comes down to choice for each individual country. What's the level you need to feel safe without it being then used extensively overseas in conflicts, which didn't need to happen?

Steve Killelea: The final domain is ongoing conflict. And so ongoing conflict measures the number of people killed in conflicts. It measures the intensity of the conflicts, and also the number of the conflicts as well which is going on. One of the more interesting things which is coming out of the work we've done, over the last 15 years what we've seen has been a growing global inequality in the levels of peace. So the countries which are most peaceful are becoming more peaceful, while the countries which are less peaceful are becoming less peaceful. What we find is once you actually get into a conflict trap, very, very hard to get out of it. And similarly, once you get very, very high levels of peace, we haven't had any countries with very high levels of peace, but major falling peace while we've been doing the index.

Deqa Aden: What are some best strategies to collect data from fragile countries? And how can we ensure accuracy when there's still some sort of violence that's happening? And what has been your strategy to ensure that we collect data from everywhere?

Steve Killelea: Yeah, well, we cover 163 countries, so about 99.7% of the population in the world. Some countries, the smaller ones, you just can't get valid data. So there's two ways of doing it. One is you use whatever official statistics you've got. The second is through using expert assessment. So if you're looking at the indicators within the Global Peace Index, they're a combination of the two. And so also you go for the best data resources that you can get your hands on.

Steve Killelea: So if you can go down into some countries, let's say DRC, for example, getting an accurate rate on a homicide rate is very hard, but you'll have estimates there. And the reality is that you are out by 10%, 15%, because you've got the 23 indicators from different directions, it doesn't matter too much. So whether something's 120 on the Global Peace Index or 130, it's not really so important - you're still getting an idea of the relative peace. But the best way of doing it, you balance it out with the best statistics you can get then combined with some things which are expert assessment. So like political instability, that'd be the example of one indicator which we use which is expert assessment.

Reema Saleh: What are the difficulties that come with quantifying this kind of data?

Steve Killelea: One is the availability of data. So it's a lot of things we'd like to measure, but there aren't yet decent data sets to measure them. Domestic violence would probably be one good example. The other thing is there's political dimension in this. And I think that's one of the reasons why we were the first organization to really do it. So because we've done a lot of work, let's say, with the European Union, for example, and they'll measure all the countries around the world by a level of peacefulness, but they won't measure anything inside the EU. Just too politically difficult.

Steve Killelea: So at times, you've got to be very, very sensitive to the political issues around this. So the mechanism we've taken with inside the Institute is we talk to the data. We don't talk to the politics. And then we let people draw their conclusions from the data. And so we've got a quite rigorous standard for just the way we talk about things so that we don't talk about them from a moral, emotional, or political lens wherever we can. But at times you'll find things like, let's say, democracies are highly correlated with peace. And so democracies are correlated with a number of other things as well. So we try and let the data do the talking.

Deqa Aden: We were wondering if you can share with us some trends about the Global Peace Index for 2021.

Steve Killelea: So if we're looking over the last decade, there's a number of trends you can see there. The first, as I mentioned, more countries have improved in peace than have deteriorated. However, when we look at overall peace, it deteriorated by 2% over the period. And it's back to what I said earlier on is that it's a lot easier for countries to deteriorate in peace than it is to improve in peace. It's also a system theory concept of tractable planes, which I've already mentioned. So a tractable plane's an area where countries get pulled into, and once you are in it, very hard to get out of. And so that's high levels of peace and low levels of peace. Then those two are tractable planes. So whereas, we find the top and the bottom of the index doesn't move around a lot. Whereas, the middle you bounce around quite a bit.

Steve Killelea: One of the other things which is interesting, I think, is militarization. So militarizations have been improving for over a decade. And then in the last three years, we've seen that trend change. And so we've now seen percentage of GDP spent on the military increasing in more countries than deteriorating and seeing the number of soldiers per 100,000 populations starting to increase after years over decreasing as well. And so I think what we're seeing is change. And this change in what appeared to be an historic trend which had been going on probably since the '80s, the end of the Cold War, and I think that's because of increased tensions in the South China Sea. It's all the militarization of China, and also an unraveling of relationships between Russia and Europe and NATO as well.

Steve Killelea: So I think these are sort of the underlying facts, not good. Violent demonstrations are on the increase. If looking at violent demonstrations, they're up 161% in the last decade. That's just steadily increasing each year. And down in the United States, if you look carefully, you can see the same trend going on there as well. So that'd be a few of the things. Homicides globally have improved, so that's an encouraging sign from one direction as well. So there are a few of the highlights which we can see out of studying the Global Peace Index.

Deqa Aden: So Iceland has been ranked the most peaceful country for the last 10 years. We are wondering why is that the case?

Steve Killelea: Yeah, well, there's always the standard joke in Iceland. Well, it's so cold, no one goes outside, do they? But I think that's a bit of a throwaway line. So I spent quite a bit of time in Iceland over the years, beautiful country. Any of your listeners ever want to have a great holiday, go to Iceland. It's one of the most spectacularly stunning places I've ever been in. But if you look at Icelandic history, it's been peaceful for a long, long while. And part of it is the environment: it's fiercely hostile. It's one of the most hostile environments in which people live. And I think what that's done is means if you're out and you've got big distances between people, if you're out and you get caught in a blizzard, you just go to the nearest house and people will welcome you in. In fact, up to about probably 30 years ago, no one locked their houses up. And if you turned up at someone's house, you're quite okay socially to go in and pour yourself a cup of tea. Put a kettle on the stove and have a cup of tea. Can you imagine doing that in Chicago or Sydney, for that matter? You'd be arrested.

Steve Killelea: But if you go back even in history, there's only been one real war fought internally within the country and that goes back to about 1200 AD, so a long, long while ago. Similarly, what happened is the men would be on boats. They'd go away for long periods of time because they had to go to get goods, bring them back, and things like that. And so the communities themselves were very, very good at integrating together.

Steve Killelea: And so I think you've got all these things which go back. One is the environment. Two is the history because they weren't into killing each other. They were into reconciling things. There's a place in Iceland where you've got two tectonic plates meeting, because it's one of the most volcanic active places in the worlds. Literally, you've got the two plates meeting, and one plate's 20 meters higher than the other plate, just the most significant place like it anywhere in the world. But they used to meet there for a big huddle once a year for about two weeks, and everyone from Iceland would come around and that's where they'd set their laws. And then the laws would be set, but you never had police or military to enforce them because the country was too scattered. It was up to the people of the country to actually enforce the laws themselves. So you've got all these rich traditions in it as well, which also I think lead to that underlying sense of high levels of peacefulness.

Deqa Aden: Now that we've discussed the current key trends in the Global Peace Index, we would like your opinion on climate change. When I think of the Global Peace Index, the first thing that comes to mind is political violence, not necessarily climate change. We were wondering why is climate change mostly excluded from the peace talks, and will there be a shift in putting climate change at the heart of peace and security discussions?

Steve Killelea: I think it's a complex issue. We've got the absence of violence or fear of violence as the definition of peace in the Global Peace Index. So putting in climate change would mess the Index up, it wouldn't be an accurate index anymore. Climate change is a very serious threat going forward, and it's going to be an amplifier on conflict, I think everyone sort of agrees with that. However, what it's amplifying is a lot of ecological degradation, and the ecological degradation is there now, and ecological degradation is a driver of conflict.

Steve Killelea: So we just put out a report, an ecological threat report, about three weeks ago. So part of it was to align with COP26, part of it was to get people focused as there's a lot of ecological threats there which we need to address now, which are drivers of conflict. For example, if we look at the 15 countries with the worst ecological damage, 15 of them are currently in conflict and four of them are on our watch lists for further large falls in peace. Now, if we look at what we call hotspot countries - there's 30 of them - so they're countries with very high ecological damage or threat, and also countries with low societal resilience. And we use positive peace to measure societal resilience. Of the 30 countries which are hotspot countries there, 28 of them are in the bottom half of the Global Peace Index.

Steve Killelea: So again, you're driving home this nexus. There's 12 countries in the world, all of them are in Africa, which are going to more than double their population in the next 30 years. Niger is the worst, it's with a projected population increase of 161%. So these countries are already ecologically degraded and stressed, and so these increases in population are just going to increase it further. And then climate change over the top of it is then just going to act as an amplifier yet again, increasing the droughts, increasing the floods. So I think climate change is going to have a real impact on the planet in the next 30 to 100 years, we really need to be taking what measures we can to reduce it.

Steve Killelea: But climate change is just one of a whole range of stresses we've got. Biodiversity is another one, it's very hard for a lot of us to fully understand the ecology and our dependence on a healthy ecology, but it's there. A lack of water is another one, and there are other stresses as well. So if we're looking at let's say food insecurity, this is one which is intimately tied in with this ecological degradation which we study and conflict, so if you look at food insecurity, it's increased 44% since 2014. And if you went back for decades prior to that, it'd been improving every year, but since 2014 it's got worse every year. In fact, it's 44% worse than what it was in 2014.

Steve Killelea: So today 2.3 billion people are food insecure, that's about 30% of the population of planet. But if you went to Africa, what you'd find is that two thirds of the population are food insecure, and getting worse. And the whole population of Africa is meant to increase by 90%, it was projected to increase by 90% in the next 30 years. So these are urgent problems which are existing there today, and so we really need to start to look at and address it. And we've got to address it in systemic ways, so we need to be looking at the whole of the system.

Steve Killelea: And so the Sahel in Africa's a pretty good example. So if you look at the Sahel in Africa for example, you've got Islamic militants there which have got loyalty to the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, so you've got refugee issues. You've got ecological degradation, lack of food, lack of a water, water is needed for the food, you've got weak governance as well. And so we need to start look at all these issues systemically, how can you pull them together and do things to improve the societal systems to tackle many of these things simultaneously? But the systems we use, and all the institutions I should say, we use are siloed.

Steve Killelea: So let's come back to the Sahel, you've got military operations there, we'll just look at this through the lens of the UN. So you've got military operations going on there, that could be UN Peacekeeping. You've got UNHCR for refugees, you've got FAO which looks at the food, you've got UNDP which looks at development. But even it comes down to siloes, like WaSH programs and standard developmental programs somewhere else. And I could keep going, but you're getting an idea. So if these are systemic problems, we need institutions which operate systemically to be able to try and tackle them and solve them.

Steve Killelea: And in the book Peace in the Age of Chaos, that's what a lot of is about, we've got to start rather than seeing these as siloed problems, a military problem, a refugee problem, a development problem, a population problem. So you've got the UN Population Fund working on family planning, another silo, it's how do we bring them together to look at a specific area and how do we now tackle that? Weak governance as well, so if you look at a lot of the states there, they’ve got very, very weak governance and very, very weak rule. So now if you're looking at building governance, well, that's back into the IMF and the World Bank, how do we bring it all together? That'd be the major thing that I'm talking about. And climate change fits as one of the issues under all of that, but a very, very big and very, very important issue.

Reema Saleh: You write a lot in your book about the importance of systems thinking and how the elements of peaceful societies come together to make resiliency. How does this approach work to measure a country's resilience to shocks or future conflict?

Steve Killelea: So what we've found is that positive peace is an excellent measure of a system. So what we've done is, the way it's been derived, it's eight different pillars. And so eight's not too many, most people can get their head around it, but it's enough to describe a such societal system. None of this is counterintuitive, things like well-functioning government, strong business environment, equitable distribution of resources, high levels of human capital, acceptance of the rights of others, good relationships with neighbors, low levels of corruption, and so they all come together systemically.

Steve Killelea: Now, what's important when you're looking at this now, and you're taking the positive peace, what we find is it's very, very good at being able to predict future falls in peace. So in that way, you'd say it is a measure of resilience. And so peace in many ways, it's a relative concept, it's only relative to another entity. So show a country as peaceful, that's dependent on the other countries you're looking at, isn't it. Or is it resilience, show a country as resilient, it's depending on what else you're looking at.

Steve Killelea: So what we find is when there's a big difference between the measures of positive peace and the measures of the Global Peace Index, it's a good predictor of large future falls in peace, so you can see that as a measure of resilience. So countries where the positive peace score is much, much lower, the actual peace of the country, they tend to fall. And now when we are using that as a model, we call that a positive peace deficit model. We can get 10 years out, we can get 70 to 90% accuracy in large falls of peace, depending on the number of countries we pick. The smaller the number of countries we pick, the more accurate the model is, which gives you an idea of the strength. So also looking at resiliency. Another example, let's look at civil resistance movements. Countries high in positive peace, they have less civil resistance movements, they last for a shorter amount of time, more moderate in their aims, more likely to achieve their aims, and are far, far, far less violent.

Steve Killelea: And so as we come back to positive peace and again systemically, we see that things which create a peaceful society such as positive peace, also create a lot of the other things which we think are important, which I mentioned earlier on, things like high per capita income, better measures of wellbeing, happiness, better measures on inclusion, better measure on ecology, better measures on development. So again, coming back and we're seeing that if you can get the societal system right, what happens is everything else follows. An example that'll come back, the ecological degradation. So no country, which has high positive peace has really poor ecological degradation. This comes back, a lot of it, to the social system. It all comes together. So if you've got a well-functioning society, you capture the amount of water which you need to sustain your culture. From that, you've got productive agriculture, you should've got good government policies to oversee agriculture, and you've got efficient markets for the distribution of the produce. Your countries like Singapore, where you can't grow enough, you've got export industries which get the income so that you can import food. And also, the country's high in positive peace in this age have all got very small population growth. So from that angle, they're quite sustainable. That's just an example. It's when you get the system right, it's self-perpetuating. It looks after itself.

Steve Killelea: And countries which are high in positive peace are quite adaptive. I mentioned seven of the eight pillars earlier on, the one I left out was free flow of information. So if you look at the way these things function, they come together. I'll just give a simple example of just how difficult is to find causality in all this. And there's certainly things which do push the system in a particular direction, but think of well functioning government, low levels of corruption, and free flow of information. Free flow of information could be epitomized by a free press, but it's more than that. So does government affect corruption or does corruption affect government? Similarly, does the free flow of information affect the way corruption's done? What is corruption? Stymieing the free flow of information. And similarly, is the government and the things it does affected by a free press or free flow of information, or does the government pass regulations to control and affect the press?

Steve Killelea: You can't pull any of it apart, can you? It's all circular. So as you start to move in the systems side of things, first thing one wants to think about is path dependency. That's the path which a culture's been on. We spoke about Iceland earlier on and we could see the path dependency of Iceland. It's a positive path dependency, which has left them with a high level of peace now. All cultures have these path dependencies. It's their history, it's their cultural norms. And so you really need to be able to understand them, because they're actually fueling the system in a particular direction. So you really need to understand them and understand what needs to change. That'd be one concept.

Steve Killelea: You've also got concept of homeostasis, or steady state. So systems try and maintain a steady state. Look what's been happening in the west with the COVID-19, the way we've been attempting to get the system and keep it in balance. This concept of a steady state, all societies are built like that. If you get outbreaks of crime, you apply more policing. Inflation breaks out, you increase interest rates, et cetera, et cetera. You find all these mechanisms, which are called encoded norms built within societies, to try and keep it in a steady state. This may be a good or may be a bad thing. If it's the steady state, which entrenches corruption, that's not so good, is it? Or it's a steady state, which entrenches the police state, that's not a good thing either. So one needs to look at this and understand it from that perspective. And so, one of the things is you've got mutual feedback loops.

Steve Killelea: What happens there, and think of two political parties as a good example. You have an input into the system, you get a response, and the response comes back and alters the input. Systems are just made up of those kind of things all the time, very different than the physical world. So think of two political parties. One makes a policy manifesto, another party now responds to that policy manifesto, and the first party now adjusts and comes back. So you got this interactive game going on, where one has an action, the other responds, the other has another action in response to it, and so you have those things going on all the time through the system. Could think of the same thing with corruption. You bring in the law to control corruption, and corruption then manifests and starts to take a new form and get active in areas where it wasn't necessarily active before, because the system is pushing it down a different direction. And this could come back to then your cultural norms, your path dependency, what is the public perception of what's acceptable corruption? Varies from society to society.

Deqa Aden: So finally, I would like to ask you, what is the biggest takeaways policy makers should take from the book Peace in the Age of Chaos?

Steve Killelea: Yeah, well, there's a number of takeaways, but I'll just hit a couple of points. I think the first we haven't really covered in this interview is peace comes with an economic dividend. Don't underestimate how strong it is, because I gave the example earlier on of the 2% higher GDP for countries which are high in positive peace compared to countries which had deteriorated. That, when you compound it over 60 years, is a profoundly big difference. But if you look at cost of violence of the global economy in 2020, it was about $15 trillion. That's about 11.6% from memory of GDP. That's a lot. None of us can imagine a world which is peaceful, but we can all imagine a world which is 10% more peaceful, and that would be equivalent of adding three new economies to the world the size of Ireland, Switzerland, and Denmark. So peace is an achievable, tangible idea and comes with strong economic dividends, which is a key interest for all politicians.

Steve Killelea: The second thing I'd say is that societies operated systems and we don't actually get it. We've got a lot of systems, we think, yeah, there's a health system, there's a policing system, an education system, but we don't understand the principles of systems thinking and the actual study of systems from a societal perspective is still in its very, very early stages. That's a lot of the stuff I talk about in the book, and a lot of the stuff we're now starting to really study at the Institute for Economics and Peace. The second thing I'd say is that we can't go about business as usual. The big issues we've got on the planet, they're global in nature, things like climate change, ever decreasing biodiversity, full use of the fresh water on the planet, but underpinning many of those is overpopulation.

Steve Killelea: Unless we have a world which is basically peaceful, we'll never get levels of trust, cooperation, and inclusiveness to solve these problems, therefore peace is a prerequisite for the survival of society as we know it in the 21st century. That's probably different than any other epoch in human history. In the 21st century, it's in everyone's self-interest, but we have to understand the system dynamics and we have to operate our political systems more systemically, because our issues today are global in nature, and they're all systemic.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Steve Killelea. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P in collaboration with The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. In this episode, I speak with Afrah Nasser, a researcher with Human Rights Watch investigating humanitarian law violations and human rights abuses in Yemen. She was an activist and independent journalist in Sana'a, and has been advocating for justice in Yemen for over a decade. So to start, can you walk us through the beginnings of the civil war in Yemen? How have things changed since the 2011 revolution?

Afrah Nasser: 2011 was a very significant point for Yemen's political life, in general. There were a lot of stereotypes about Yemen, that following the Arab Spring, there will not be an uprising or any democratic aspiration in Yemen, given that it's heavily tribal society and there is not room for democracy or a democratic life already. But in 2011, all the youth took the street and protestors were chanting, “irhal, irhal,” which means, "leave, leave." Meaning they were demanding the downfall of the president back then Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than 30 years and was preparing presidency for his son. And then 2011 was the start of all what we see today because there was an international war to topple him with some conditions. So Ali Abdullah Saleh gave up power after the UN and the Gulf Cooperation Council led by Saudi Arabia, stepped in and gave him a power transfer deal, which meant that he was going to give away power and then an exchange of impunity.

Afrah Nasser: So there was guarantee that he was not going to face any transitional justice or at least 400 people from his circle. And that was in my opinion, the seed of the civil war that followed in 2014, because the transition without justice was a recipe for a disaster already. So in 2014, there was alliance between the former president Ali Abdbullah Saleh and the rebel group, the Houthis, to take revenge against some of the political actors inside Yemen that worked with the international community to topple him. And it was like a marriage of convenience because Ali Abdullah Saleh and Houthis already had several episodes of war, but because they had mutual interest at that time. So, that alliance was planning to challenge the presidency of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. So in 2014, the Houthi armed group marched into the capital Sana’a and took control of the major institution and gradually took over of the state.

Afrah Nasser: And then this was marked with a lot of violence inside Yemen, especially the capital, which escalated with the intervention of the Saudi-led coalition in 2015. So in March you had the Saudi Ambassador to the US back then Adel al-Jubeir, announcing from the US that Saudi Arabia was leading a coalition of nine to eleven, I'm not sure, Arab states that were going to form a military alliance and fight the Houthi armed group in Sana'a, as he described the Houthi were backed by Iran, and that was a big threat to Saudi Arabia. So since then, seeing the major conflict between the Saudi-led coalition with two key actors in that coalition are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates fighting in Yemen, the Houthi armed group. And then at the same time, civilians were really facing so many abuses in violations by the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi armed group.

Afrah Nasser: And then in 2017 in the Houthis killed Ali Abdullah Saleh, which gave them eventually the upper hand in controlling the capital Sana'a. So today you have the Houthi armed group controlling major parts of the north. While in the south, you have the Southern Transitional Council, which is backed by the UAE, controlling some part of the south. And also there is a presence of the Saudi-led coalition-backed Yemeni forces in the east of Yemen and south. So today we can say that Yemen is divided by different part, by different actors, which is like a multi-layered conflict. So you have one civil conflict, and then on the other level, it's internationalized because the Saudi-led coalition is enabled by the arm deals that it's able to add from major Western states like the US, the UK, France, Canada, et cetera.

Reema Saleh: Could you talk about some of the human rights abuses that have been coming from both parties?

Afrah Nasser: Yeah. So since throughout the course of the conflict, we've seen unlawful attacks by the Saudi led coalition, some of the abuses and violations include bombing schools, hospitals, funerals, weddings, and other civilian sites. The exact number of the casualties in my opinion, is underestimated. So according to the UN the latest statistics from the UN is that nearly a quarter of a million people have been killed. And that's not only by the unlawful attacks, but also including the humanitarian impact of the conflict. And then there is also lack of reliable statistics about the casualties of people killed by hostilities and unlawful attacks by the Houthi armed group. So, that makes it really unfair to describe the impact of the unlawful attacks. But from what we've seen is that the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi armed group forces are committing unlawful attacks or use of violence against civilians or civilian targets.

Afrah Nasser: And then one of the major abuse that I care a lot about and work on a lot, is the detention crisis across the country. So, we've seen since the beginning of the conflict, there is a widespread of arbitrary detention and forcible disappearance of countless number of civilians. And Saudi-led coalition-backed Yemeni forces and the Houthi armed group are all responsible of committing those detention cases. So without exaggeration, from my experience working on this, I feel like every household have been impacted by the detention crisis. I'm bombarded with messages of relatives of missing men who are asking Human Rights Watch to document their cases. It's just the level of detention is just shocking. And the longer the war goes on, the more new groups are impacted by the detention situation. So this year there are reports from the UN coming saying that there are children also that were detained by some of the parties of the conflict. Human Rights Watch, we've worked on the case of the Yemeni model, Intisar al-Hammadi.

Afrah Nasser: So we've seen also women are being also subjected to detention. So, Intisar al-Hammadi is still imprisoned and facing unfair trial in Sana'a by the court that's controlled by the Houthi authorities. And there are other women also that are detained in her case as well and their families are not able to speak up because of the really deadly consequences of them speaking. So detention is just one area that I feel like is impacting every household. The situation for children also is just one of the most horrific aspect of the conflict. Because maybe not many people know, but most of the Yemeni population are below the age of 15. So it's a really young population and you see the impact of the conflict directly on children. So, today we have more than half the 20 million people who are in need of humanitarian assistance or protection in Yemen, are children.

Afrah Nasser: And most of these children will have those consequences of the humanitarian crisis for all their lives, because it impacts their growth, it impacts their intellectual ability. And just every time there is images of skinny children who are becoming the face of the starvation or famine in Yemen, it just breaks my heart because this is going to have long term devastation to the country. And then also children are impacted by the hostilities and violence in particular. We've seen children being targets of shelling by the Houthi armed group while playing, for example. Those cases are really just like a shocking mirror of the violations of their basic rights. And parties to the conflict also continue to use the schools for the military efforts and purposes. So it's just children don't... there is no safe place for children. Neither when they are playing in the street or...even their schools are being targeted.

Afrah Nasser: And it just breaks my heart. The situation from children is one of the worst, I would say, in the conflict in Yemen. And land mines also are a silent killer that not many people really pay attention to. So what we have seen according to some estimates that the death of land mines is at least 9,000 people who were killed. And in particular, the Houthi armed group have used anti-personnel landmines in conducting indiscriminate attacks. So I can go on, the list is really long, but I think one of the things that really concerned maybe the audience is the humanitarian situation and the starvation and the warning from the UN about famine and the humanitarian crisis. And there are many factors that are playing in this regard. But what we know is that parties to the conflict have had tactics or abusive practice that really exaggerated an already dire humanitarian crisis.

Afrah Nasser: So even us in Human Rights Watch, we have documented severe restrictions by the Houthi authorities, the Yemeni government, and even affiliated forces, and the UAE-backed STC forses. They all have had restriction on the delivery of the desperately needed humanitarian aid. So the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, it's not a natural disaster, or it didn't happen out of nowhere. It's man made and we know that parties to the conflict are responsible of that. Another underreported, I think, aspect of the conflict is the abuses that migrants face. So this year we saw that a migrant detention center was on fire in the north part of Yemen in Sana'a and it was under the control of the Houthi authorities. And from our investigation, we called the Houthi authorities to hold those responsible of the fire to account. And until today, for all those abuses, there were no justice.

Afrah Nasser: And that tells you about the urgent need of justice and redress for the victims in the course of Yemen conflict. So just last month, the UN specialized group investigating violations in Yemen for the fourth year, published a report saying that, "Until there is no political will from the international communities to address the lack of accountability, we will continue to see the situation in Yemen getting worse and worse and more abuses and more violations." Because parties to the conflict feel that they have free access and no consequences whatsoever in committing all these abuses. And unfortunately, that's being enabled by the silence of the international community and lack of political will to address the lack of accountability.

Reema Saleh: What responsibility does the international community bear for some of these atrocities, especially now that the US has resumed arm sales with the UAE?

Afrah Nasser: Yeah, there is a huge responsibility when we talk about international mechanisms, when it comes to accountability and international humanitarian law and international human rights, Yemen is a great example of the collective responsibility and collective failure, because there are many international actors that are involved in the conflict in Yemen. So the Saudi-led coalition began the military operation with UN Security Council Resolution in 2015. And it's been having the backing and support of most of the international community. And that means the US, the UK, France, others. And it just tells you how this is not just Saudi Arabia fighting in Yemen, but it also all these super powers as well. And then on the other hand, you have within the UN Security Council, we've seen Russia and Iran fully giving diplomatic support to the Houthi. And there are many news media reports about Iran supporting the Houthis militarily and helping them with training and et cetera.

Afrah Nasser: So the international actors in Yemen have huge responsibility to how the course of the conflict has been going. And when I say it's also like a collective failure, because I feel like when we talk about the international humanitarian law, there are mounting evidence, overwhelming evidence documented by respected international non-governmental, non-profit human rights groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and even Yemeni local rights groups, and even the UN. The UN has established two teams investigating humanitarian IHL abuses and violations in Yemen. And while we have all this overwhelming evidence and documentation and reports, they are all faced by deaf ears from the international community. And it seems there is a collective failure from the international community to pay attention to what is needed and to their legal obligation. And for example, ending their arms deals to parties to the conflict, or even rethinking how they are sending these weapons, what role they are playing in abuses in Yemen. So the international community has a huge responsibility, but also has a huge collective failure.

Reema Saleh: There was an interview that I think you did with Jadaliyya a few months ago, that I came across where you unpack the idea of why Western media often erroneously refers to Yemen as the forgotten war. Can you talk a bit about how Yemen was never remembered by the international community to be forgotten? Could you talk a little more about what this means and what we should take away from it?

Afrah Nasser: Yeah. I would like to answer to that by going back to how the international media and in particular media in the US were feeling about Yemen when Khashoggi was killed. During that time, when Jamal Khashoggi was killed by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, there were like this hype, and huge desire and willingness to investigate violations committed by Saudi Arabia at home and outside. And that included putting more scrutiny to what's going on in Yemen. And that was a reality check that Yemen did only matter because it was being seen through the Saudi lens. So Yemen was never a subject matter by itself. There has to be one reason, so we can pay attention to Yemen. There has to be another major event, and then we can look at Yemen. And also when there are other major events happening around the world, secretly, I always pray I hope nothing happened in Yemen during that time, because I know there will not be any media coverage. So for example, with all what was going on in Afghanistan, Yemen just slide to the end of the agenda, or even not even in the agenda of media coverage. I don't mean any disrespect to other tragedies in Afghanistan. And even before that it was in Syria or even to the heinous crime against Jamal Khashoggi, but it's just an interesting way of trying to compare how Yemen don't matter. And how it's really hard to get the media care about what's going on in Yemen. So today you have one challenge that I get, a lot of emails people asking me, "What more can we say about Yemen that hasn't been said before?"

Afrah Nasser: And I think it doesn't feel right, this question. Because look at your invitation, for example, you just invited me to, "Can you tell us about what's going on in Yemen?" So it's just so simple and easy, and it's heartbreaking how Yemen don't matter when it's facing the largest humanitarian crisis. It's just heartbreaking why Yemen don't matter when it's the poorest Arab nation where some of the world's richest countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE are infighting. So I think this should be like a very interesting angle to any journalist, any researcher, any scholar, and yet Yemen is just not even in the map. I'm not going to say it's forgotten, it just doesn't count. For me, it's just shocking, really. I mean, one way that we Yemenis think about this is that, because we are poor, because Yemen is poor, that is the main reason nobody cares about it. Even if someone shows solidarity to Yemen, we feel like, "Oh, thank you for being exception, and seeing a value and showing solidarity to us." But Yemen has a rich history just given an opportunity, it can be as rich as Saudi Arabia, as rich as the United Arab Emirates. So as we speak today, I can see all the bling bling in the UAE Expo 2020 event. And for me, it's disturbing seeing all this extravagance in the UAE while there is misery and pain in their neighboring country in Yemen, while the UAE is backing, some of the most abusive armed forces on the ground, it's just so disturbing. And I just wish there is a chance for Yemen to flourish outside this conflict.

Reema Saleh: The World Food Program has faced some major funding shortfalls this year. With Yemen being its biggest humanitarian operation, what does that mean for the future?

Afrah Nasser: I think the humanitarian crisis is the bigger than just the lack or decline in funding. As long as there is war profiteering and war economy that was created as a product of the conflict, we will continue to have this humanitarian crisis and no amount of humanitarian aid can fix the situation. So today, for example, you have major restrictions from parties to the conflict, the mobility of humanitarian operation personnel and goods within and outside Yemen is extremely difficult, and they are faced by several restrictions from authorities on the ground, and even the Saudi-led coalition as it controls the air base of Yemen. So without lifting those restrictions, no amount of humanitarian aid can fix the situation or make the humanitarian crisis go away. And then you have the war economy. And one, just one tiny aspect of it is the taxation system on the ground.

Afrah Nasser: So there are some tracks that go from east Yemen to south or north. They are being taxed by every point, by every authority that is controlling the different parts. So logistics are becoming more and more expensive. And sometimes they outweigh the humanitarian aid itself. So without dealing and addressing all these obstacles, I think we will continue to have humanitarian crisis. This is why we need accountability measures so we can address or mitigate the humanitarian crisis. It's just a dilemma. You have to rethink your humanitarian strategies in Yemen, given the violations and abuses and restrictions and obstruction of humanitarian aid.

Reema Saleh: So what will eventually need to be done to ensure accountability for these human rights violations when the war is ended?

Afrah Nasser: That will be a huge work for all human rights groups. If the war ends today, that means we have a lot of things to do. But meanwhile, we think that it's so important for Western states, states that are mentioned in the documentation of the UN groups and human rights groups. So we have today, the US, UK, France, Canada, they all have to suspend their arms deals that are going to the conflict in Yemen, going into the parties in the conflict, that are basically enabling the continuation of the conflict. Now, I remember how during Donald Trump, there was this narrative that we can't suspend our arms deal to Saudi Arabia because it's creating a lot of jobs and that will impact our own national economic make interests. So why I'm focusing about the arms deal is because I think this is the least thing that the international community can show that they have accountability, or they want to take the parties to the conflict accountable to what's going on or violations and abuses in Yemen.

Afrah Nasser: And if the state's only way of making money is out of the blood of innocent civilians in Yemen, I think they have a huge problem already. Arms deals are very specific demand that all human rights groups have been asking since the beginning of the conflict. And God bless his soul, when Jamal Khashoggi was killed, there were countries actually that started to suspend their arms deals. So you had Germany, for example, some countries in Scandinavia. So we've seen that this was doable before, so why we don't do it now? I think arms deals is one specific area that the international community can address the lack of accountability.

Reema Saleh: How do you remember Yemen before the civil war?

Afrah Nasser: I remember my college. I remember my school. I remember the nice sessions with families, the jokes. I remember generosity. It's just like everywhere you go. People are just so generous. Even relatives are generous to each other. Neighbors are generous to each other and the more I'm working on Yemen, the more I understand that generosity is fundamental part of Yemeni culture because of war, famine, and misery and pain. So Yemenis do understand what's like to be hungry, what does it feel to be hungry? So they're always generous with food. You might go to the most poor family and yet they will get out everything that they have and show hospitality and try to serve you the best what they have. So this I always remember. And I think the work cannot take that away also.

Reema Saleh: Can I ask what initially brought you to blogging and journalism and writing in general?

Afrah Nasser: Yeah. I started writing in my journals when I was teenager and then that escalated to writing in local newspapers during my first years of college. And then when I finished college and I joined Yemen Observer, a newspaper in Sana'a, I started to blog also and put some writing in my blog. I've always been passionate about writing, but I think me focusing on writing about Yemen comes from the fact that I had Ethiopian origin. So half of my family are Ethiopians and the other Yemenis. In Ethiopia, I was typical like of all mixed races. In Ethiopia, I was looked as like, "Oh, she's Yemeni." And then in Yemen, I was like, "Oh, she's Ethiopian." But all I know is Yemen. My native language is Arabic. And I grew up in Sana'a and I've always felt I was from Sana'a. So I wanted to demonstrate or prove to the society that I was more Yemeni than any other Yemeni. So, this is why I started writing about Yemen.

Afrah Nasser: Maybe it was in English in the beginning because I felt that was the safe space, because I can speak Amharic as well. And then Arabic was also my native language, but I was being told that, "Oh, you're not Yemeni." So that felt I wasn't Arab also. And then English was somewhere that I chose it wasn't imposed on me or something. Yeah, that's how it all started.

Reema Saleh: Half my family is from Ethiopia as well.

Afrah Nasser: Oh, interesting.

Reema Saleh: Yeah. The other half is from Eritrea.

Afrah Nasser: Yeah. I mean, what's going on in Ethiopia and Eritrea tells you how some of these countries, their history is just full of war and conflicts. And it just makes you really wonder when will this end. But the fact that you're saying Ethiopia and Eritrea, all these neighbors they continue to migrate between each other. My grandfathers during the civil war in Yemen in the 60s, he immigrated to Ethiopia. And then when the conflict happen in Ethiopia during the 70s and 80s, my family, my parents came back to Yemen. That's going through one circle, I think.

Reema Saleh: Yeah. There's definitely a lot of moving back and forth. I have family that's moved between home and Dubai and Saudi, it's definitely... I feel like we're all tied together somehow.

Afrah Nasser: Exactly.

Reema Saleh: Can I ask you what your relationship with your homeland is like now that you're a journalist and the diaspora?

Afrah Nasser: Well, today I am a researcher. I'm not involved in journalism anymore, but I feel like I'm growing into like a global citizen. So, for example, something that I started to care a lot about is climate change or climate injustice, climate crisis, which is impacting everywhere. And COVID really also taught you how this world is a small place. So one virus went everywhere and impacted everywhere. And if one place is not safe, the other will not be safe. So that identity, I think, is becoming more and more clear to me, being global citizen. And I don't think of myself as someone in exile or even me working on Yemen, basically what I'm doing is connecting the dots between the other parts of the world and Yemen. So it doesn't mean I'm just Yemeni from Yemen and working on Yemen. No, I'm actually interested in what's going on everywhere. So the election in Germany, for example, and who will come next after Angela Merkel will definitely impact the arm sales industry, and how that will fuel the conflict in Yemen. And that just example. So I'm interested in everything that is global. And as a global citizen, I think we're far connected than we ever think.

Reema Saleh: So blogging can be a medium between journalism and activism in a way. So how do you think your independence allowed you to cover issues that went under reported?

Afrah Nasser: Yeah. No, it's helped me a lot. I remember one friend in Sweden in 2011 when I first came to Sweden and I mentioned that I had a blog and then we were discussing things about Yemen. And I told him like, "maybe you can read a World Bank report instead of my blog." And then he turned to me and he told me like, "your blog is more credible to me than most of these institutions’ reports." And today I understand why he was saying that. I had so much freedom outside big institutions’ policies and the dos and don’ts and that freedom... I was just writing things that I thought mattered the most to me as someone Yemeni and to my friends, to my relatives. So I wanted to show Yemen from our perspective.

Afrah Nasser: And I think that when you really believe in your value, that's like the most revolutionized thing you can do. Because I didn't believe much of the international media coverage on Yemen and how sometimes - I'm not saying all the time - but they describe Yemen with just one focus. Which is like, for example, terrorism, and I thought Yemen was bigger than that.

Afrah Nasser: So I wanted to talk about all of that. So for example, terrorism. For me, poverty was the biggest terrorism for civilians in Yemen. Not al-Qaeda, or Daesh, and things like that, or the corruption from Ali Abdullah Saleh regime. How that really fueled terrorism that the international media is talking about. So, things like that, for me, just being genuine and truthful were very, very important. And I think that why my writing resonated to a lot of people.

Reema Saleh: Definitely. I think there's something really human in a lot of the stories you were writing at the time.

Afrah Nasser: It's not about being human. It's just I felt like we are not any less than any other nation. Yemen is important like Saudi is important, like the UAE. So I was just writing like that.

Reema Saleh: Yeah. So this is my last question. What inspires you to keep working and what brings you hope in these times?

Afrah Nasser: You see there is this saying, I forgot the name of the philosopher, but he says, "Optimist by the will, and pessimist by the intellect." And it feels like you have to have some sort of hope so you can continue doing what you're doing. Otherwise, there will be no point in the work that you do. And I think tyrannies really want us to have despair and just give up. I think that is what gives me motive to continue is just, I don't want to give tyrannies what they want and I think we need to take what's rightfully ours.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Afrah Nasser. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and The Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on The Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema, and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts.

You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world.

Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, Aishwarya and Wafa speak with Dr. Salma Mousa, a political scientist studying social cohesion after conflict, and what policies can build trust between groups. She talks about her latest study on building social cohesion between Christian and Muslim youth soccer players in post-ISIS Iraq.

Dr. Salma Mousa: As someone who grew up in the Middle East and who was also an immigrant in Canada for a while, the question of how someone's social identity conditions so much of what happens in their life, and how other people treat them, and how they see themselves, was always something that was very top of mind for me. I noticed different situations or environments where my nationality mattered or my religion mattered, and other environments where it didn't matter at all.

And this was all happening against the backdrop of the sporadic violence, especially when I lived in Saudi Arabia, which was targeted based on sect and based on nationality. And so, being in that kind of environment you start to think, okay, so my identity seems to matter sometimes a lot, and other times, it doesn't matter at all.

And so, how can we get identity to matter less? Because the Middle East is not necessarily a place where these social identities have always existed, number one. And number two, these identities have not been things that have structured conflict. It's not necessarily the case that we have to keep killing each other for these socially constructed things. And it wasn't the case for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, for many ethnic and sectarian fault lines.

So, how can we get those things to stop being fault lines, given that there's nothing inherent in our culture that suggests that it has to be that way?

Wafa Eben Beri: Thank you so much. It's a very interesting point that you are bringing your personal perspective into that and your interests professionally. For our listeners who are not familiar with your work, can you tell us about your study that is titled Building Social Cohesion Between Christians and Muslims Through Soccer in Post-ISIS Iraq and what the main findings were?

Dr. Salma Mousa: Sure. So, the study that you referred to was a field experiment in Northern Iraq where I was able to set up a series of soccer leagues, and I was able to randomly assign amateur Christian soccer teams to either receive fellow Christian players or receive some Muslim players, and then they train and compete for a two-month period.

And what I found was being assigned to a mixed team made Christians more accepting and tolerant toward Muslims in terms of their behaviors, but not really toward the Muslims, more broadly. So, what I mean by that is, I found this distinction between how you treat people you know from an outgroup compared to how you treat strangers.

And so, I found that this contact within soccer leagues was really effective at building these local social ties and improving tolerant behaviors toward your teammates and other guys you met in the league, but it did not extend to Muslims more broadly outside of that environment.

So, for example, being assigned to a mixed soccer team did not make you more likely to visit Mosul, which is a big Muslim-dominated city about 40 minutes away from the study sites. So, this suggests that this theory of intergroup contact can be promising in building this very localized community level social cohesion, but it's not necessarily achieving its goal of building generalized social cohesion and prejudice reduction.

Wafa Eben Beri: That's a very interesting point, because, based on my experience in Israel and working with Jewish groups, I found the same finding. The findings showed that the group contact didn't affect the perception of the participant toward the individual from the other group, and less affects the perception toward the collective group represented by the participant.

For example, someone would say, "When I meet this Arab guy, he's very nice, but not all the Arabs are like that, and he's an exception." Could you tell us, how can we expand social cohesion to a more broad level, to take this interaction that has happened between the participant and the individuals to a more collective level?

Dr. Salma Mousa: So, now I know I need to read your work because this sounds very relevant to what I'm looking at right now. And you highlight a really important issue, which is that these kinds of contact interventions, they aim not to just improve how you feel toward the one or two people who you meet, or who you're friends with, but to actually generalize those positive feelings toward the entire outgroup.

And if that generalization doesn't happen, if you don't update your beliefs about the entire group based on a handful of interactions, then the contact theory is really a failure. It's really trivial. It's nice to build some friendships here and there, but it's just not nearly scalable enough that this is something that we should necessarily be turning to, especially in conflict zones.

So, this question of how can you encourage the generalization of effects, I think this is an open question. Social psychologists point to a few factors that might help. One is typicality. So, you need to view the contact partners as typical, or representative in some way, in order for you to infer something about the entire group.

And actually, I do have some work on this looking at a Muslim soccer star in England, Mohamed Salah, who plays for Liverpool. And long story short, we do find that when you prime people to think about his Muslim identity and that he's a practicing Muslim, it makes Liverpool supporters, the fans of the club, more likely to say that Islam is compatible with British values.

So, this link, emphasizing this link between that one person and the whole group can help facilitate that process, but there's still really a lot that we don't know about it. I mean, people can still exceptionalize a handful of individuals who they like and choose not to see them as representative. So, the question is, is someone really objectively ever typical or representative, or is that actually a function of prejudice, whether you choose to see them as exceptional or not.

And there's this other tension between being representative, but also not confirming stereotypes. So, your group identity should be salient, but it shouldn't be salient in any negative way. You shouldn't be doing any stereotype-confirming behaviors because that won't work. So, there's some tensions, I think, here in the social psychological literature that need exploring.

Aishwarya Raje: So, I'd love to hear more about how you looked at soccer specifically as the framework for your work on social cohesion. I mean, I'm a huge fan of professional soccer, and I'm a terrible player, but I'm a huge fan, I mean, millions of people around the world are. I mean, what do you think it is about the sport, or perhaps team sports in general, that can potentially take a group of people beyond just recreation and competition, and actually build deeper connections on a more human level?

Dr. Salma Mousa: I think there's a few different routes through which sports can build social cohesion. I can think of a few just off the top of my head. One is that team sports naturally fulfill a lot of the conditions laid out by the contact hypothesis.

So, contact across group lines is supposed to reduce prejudice when the contact involves cooperating for a common goal, when it's endorsed by authorities who people respect, and when you are on equal footing, so there's not necessarily a hierarchy or an unequal power status. So all those conditions really lend themselves very nicely to team sports.

There's also, I think, an argument to be made about creating another identity as being fans of the same team or players on the same team. And so, it highlights this common third identity that's shared between people. And so, it highlights commonalities in that way, rather than differences. So, those are just two ways that I think sports – whether you're playing or whether you're watching – can actually... can build some social cohesion or erode some of the group boundaries.

Wafa Eben Beri: During my work I saw a lot of different types of group contact that can yield sometimes different results related to social cohesion. What I mean by that, such as the difference between groups that meet through soccer or food, This is something that sometimes we find something in common. And the group that meet, for example, I have examples in Ireland or in Israel, in bilingual schools or through activism or volunteering together. Can you tell us more about what you think, and if there are different results related to this group contact with different purposes?

Dr. Salma Mousa: Yeah, absolutely. So, this is something that's important, right? What kinds of settings and environments produce contact under those ideal conditions? Team sports is one that lends itself naturally to this, but there are a few others as well.

To some extent, classrooms. You don't have so much the element of having a common goal, but there tends to be some cooperation, having equal footing, having an authority figure that endorses the interactions. So, classroom settings can be positive, and we do find that in the literature.

What's even stronger, most of the time, tends to be roommate assignments. So there, you don't necessarily have cooperation as much, but it's that kind of environment where you have these mini-cooperative interactions and generally a positive experience. And that is also something that we found that is actually effective at reducing prejudice.

Military conscription is another one, military training. So, again, it's the roommate mechanism, but really that fighting with each other and relying on each other seems to be really important. And so, if you want to extrapolate the commonalities across these different settings where we have seen positive effects, and looking at studies that have found negative effects of contact – and there are a few of those – I’d say one of the most important conditions is that you are not competing, that you are cooperating and not competing.

The degree of cooperation, it's a little unclear how much cooperation you need, but definitely the presence of active competition is almost always negative. So, I'd say that if we're starting to move toward an understanding of what are the necessary conditions, I would say that's as close to a necessary condition as we found.

Wafa Eben Beri: I have a follow-up question. You said about the negative results, when we put competition or we don't have a common goal between the interactions of the groups. Can you tell us in which way the results will be negative, how the results are being presented when it's negative? Is it that people become more prejudiced? Can you talk more about that?

Dr. Salma Mousa: So, we don't have a lot of very, I say, solid work about this, but I think there are some plausible explanations for why competitive contact is bad. I think the most common sense one to me is that it highlights otherness.

So, if you're put in a situation where you feel that you need to come compete with this group, either for jobs or for scarce resources or even in a sports game, you start to view that person and their group as being opposed to you, necessarily. You are against them. They are different. We have no preferences in common. Our goals are diametrically opposed to each other.

And that, I think, just stresses the sense of otherness and difference, rather than what you want, which is the opposite, where you want to feel like you have some things in common. At least you should have a common goal, even if you have nothing else in common.

I think the other plausible explanation is that there are some interactions that come along with cooperating, like you have to discuss, you have to compromise, you have to make decisions together. And that process, that negotiation process, and just the micro-foundations of actually working together can reveal things about people's personality, can humanize them more. It opens up more of what we call “friendship potential,” which is something that has been found to be very key to contact.

This kind of one-sided exposure where you just see someone in the subway or something – that can actually cause a backlash effect – but you need some space for friendship potential, some conversation in a not so emotionally charged environment. And so, I say those two things where that competition can emphasize otherness and, at the same time, it has very low friendship potential.

Aishwarya Raje: I'd be curious to hear your observations about how you've seen social cohesion play out based on gender. Of course, the study that you did focused on creating soccer teams for young men, but in a lot of context, I think we see women being the social backbone for their families and communities. So, I'm curious as to how you see those dynamics play out in a post-conflict context.

Dr. Salma Mousa: I don't have that much to say about this only because we have such little research that I'm aware of that looks specifically at social cohesion-building strategies that target women specifically. But what I can speak about is my own experience working in Northern Iraq.

I initially wanted to actually have an intervention targeted at women and bringing women from Muslim and Christian groups together, and it became clear very quickly that the social norms in Northern Iraq were not really conducive to this. This is because there's this unofficial system where women are not really permitted to be out in public, and especially in areas with unfamiliar people if they don't have their brother or their husband with them.

So, you would need the permission of the husbands, or the brothers, or the dads in order to be in these new spaces where they're going to be mixing across group lines with people that are unknown or strangers from the out-group. And so, because of the difficulty of actually arranging that contact, I then decided to focus more on men.

And so, this, I think, is an important question of how should we target these kinds of interventions, and I think there is a case to be made that you want to target potentially norm changers or norm leaders when it comes to prejudice. And we should be doing more work to understand how social cohesion operates among women. But, at the same time, there is one benefit of targeting whoever the norm leaders are in society, often, it's men, in that you might actually accelerate some of the change potentially.

Wafa Eben Beri: Can you tell us how group context affects the general political situation or the leadership in the country and vice-versa?

Dr. Salma Mousa: This is the million-dollar question. We have a lot of tools at the grassroots level for building social cohesion. So, things like intergroup contact, empathy-building interventions or education, perspective-taking exercises, and they seem to work, under some conditions, at the grassroots level. But the question is, how are these things affecting the structural barriers to social cohesion?

There are reasons why groups are in conflict, or one group is explicitly being oppressed. And these kinds of grassroots interventions, they're great at building this community level social cohesion – and that's a good thing – but are they really going to address the structural roots of conflict that cause this situation in the first place? And I'm much more skeptical about that.

So, can things like contact overcome barriers to integration like residential segregation, like ethnic entrepreneurs or political entrepreneurs who start stoking tensions between groups? These kinds of more environment-level barriers to cohesion, I think, are much harder to overcome without policy tools.

I think the ideal recipe would be a mixture of both. I think you need stuff happening at the grassroots level and policies at the structural level to really build lasting and sustainable peace. One of the reasons, actually, why this is important, is that if you just do the policy-level intervention, and you don't have grassroots support at least, or acceptance of the intervention, it might not actually have a positive effect.

I'm thinking, for example, some east Asian countries where they actually have very progressive immigration policies, but on the ground, there was not acceptance by the host population. And they're like, “Oh, why are you giving preferential treatments to immigrants?” So, actually, it can go the other way. So, ideally, you need, I think, a mix of those two things, but how you aggregate up from the grassroots level to the policy level, I think, is still unclear.

Aishwarya Raje: And that's a really great segway into my next question, because I know another element of your research interest is migration policy and refugee resettlement and integration.

And I'm curious, would you say that this model of building sports teams between perhaps host populations and refugee populations could facilitate greater refugee integration into the host countries? And how translatable do you think this model is to contexts that are not necessarily post-conflict, but in contexts that are generally just lacking a lot of social cohesion?

Dr. Salma Mousa: So, there are some reasons why the theory of change around social cohesion might be different in post-conflict societies and in recently post-violent societies.

I think the distrust towards strangers is higher. The averseness to risk is also higher. The lingering effects of personal trauma, psychological trauma, and community-level trauma is also very high. So, I think for all these reasons – and just baseline prejudice is probably high too. So, for all these reasons, you have a really hard case when you're going into recently post-conflict societies and trying to conduct these kinds of grassroots-level peace-building tools.

At the same time, I think there is a lot of overlap in what we do in peacetime and what can be done in post-conflict societies. So, for example, this idea of intergroup contact, positive contact actually reducing prejudice, it depends to the extent to which you see some of these cleavages in the West as being post-conflict or not, or actively antagonistic.

For me, it's not obvious. For example, if we're looking at law enforcement and minority groups in the US, that's an actively antagonistic situation in a lot of cases. So, I think a lot of these distinctions between post -conflict and peacetime or West and Global South are not necessarily that relevant when you start looking on a case-by-case basis where you do have this active antagonism and hostility, and oftentimes violence as well.

What I would just say is that any time you have that situation where it's active conflict, you are setting things up to be harder, where you have to take a lot more precautions, not least of which from an ethical perspective, before getting into these kinds of grassroots interventions and getting people together, who are not necessarily ready to be brought together yet. So, there's just this extra layer of precautions that need to be taken.

Wafa Eben Beri: How can your research findings can shape the policies in a country in post-conflict, and especially in the context of peacebuilding?

Dr. Salma Mousa: So, I've done a few studies now looking specifically at this idea of contact. Generally, it looks like the effects are positive, but they're much more limited in post-conflict or active conflict settings.

So, what I would suggest to policy makers is any environment or space that you have control over where people are mixing or have the potential to mix across social lines, try to optimize those interactions so that they create the kind of ideal conditions for contact that we know to be generally positive. So, try to avoid competition, try to make the interactions recurring, not a one-time thing, try to get the endorsement of communal leaders who are respected. So, those spaces that you do have control over, optimize them for positive contact.

At the same time, I don't think you can rely only on grassroots tools alone for sustainable peace. So, we need to be addressing the structural roots of either oppression or intergroup conflict, depending on the setting. And so, we need to address things like residential segregation. That's causing people not to interact in the first place, for example. We need to address the kind of national rhetoric or the rhetoric of politicians that demonize certain groups.

So, you can't really just rely on the grassroots level. There has to be support at the policy level as well.

Wafa Eben Beri: Thank you so much.

Dr. Salma Mousa: That was really fun.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Salma Mousa. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh.

Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema, and you’re listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcasts. You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies, and policy issues it affects.

In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs, and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, Aishwarya and Marina speak with Aimee Hilado, a clinical social worker and researcher specializing in immigrant and refugee mental health.

Aishwarya Raje: My name is Aishwarya Raje, and I'm a graduate student at the Harris School of Policy where I'm also a fellow with the Pearson Institute. And on this episode of Root of Conflict, I'm joined by my classmate Marina Milaszewska to sit down with Dr. Aimee Hilado. Dr. Hilado is an expert on refugee and immigrant mental health. She's also an Associate Professor of Social Work at Northeastern Illinois University, and she's the founding clinical director of the RefugeeOne Wellness Program, which is a mental health program established in 2011 for refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Illinois. Dr. Hilado, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Dr. Aimee Hilado: Thank you for having me.

Aishwarya Raje: So, just to dive right in, what led you to focus your career on mental health and wellness for conflict-affected populations and those who have experienced trauma, and why are these issues that should be prioritized when it comes to working with these populations?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: I'm the daughter of immigrants from the Philippines. And so, thinking about how to navigate adjusting to life in a new country was really part of my upbringing, watching my parents navigating life in the US. Now, every immigrant story is very different, but there was something about that draw. That draw of understanding, “How do people adjust to life in a new country.” And as time had progressed, I realized that the nature of folks that are coming to the United States is because they have no choice, because they are forced to leave their home countries, that their experiences were unique. And that services in the field didn't adequately address some of the mental health issues that come when you are forcibly displaced.

And that really was what opened my eyes to this work. I'm a clinical social worker by training. I'm an academic researcher, as you said, an immigrant and refugee mental health and much of my career has really focused on how do we think about supporting the health and mental wellbeing of forcibly displaced immigrants and refugees who are in the United States, while elevating their stories to inform policies that are made that do directly impact those that we serve.

Aishwarya Raje: So, later today, you'll be presenting at an event here at Harris, which is organized by the Pearson Institute and by Rotary International, which is focused on evidence-based approaches to working with conflict-affected populations, which makes a lot of sense because we're here at Harris where our slogan is “Social impact down to a science”. So, can you speak to some of the evidence-based approaches that you use when working with these populations, and how do those approaches potentially change depending on the cultural context of the populations that you're working with?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: So, as part of my work, I started a mental health program for immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers called the RefugeeOne Wellness Program. This is a program that's nested in a larger refugee resettlement program, RefugeeOne, and we've been in operation since 2011. We've been resettling refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors from all over the world. And really for me, in thinking about how to effectively operate a program, we had to have a deep understanding of who we were serving.

And so, we integrated a lot of ongoing data collection methods to really get to the heart of what's the need: Who are we serving? What's their story, and what treatments are most effective? And so, we have been tracking what are the symptoms based on region of the world, length of time displaced, gender, age, level of education, because all of that directly impacts the treatment modalities that we use. And over time, in the eight years we've been doing this, some of it is just by what we do, what we learn while we're in the field, but also very intentional studies, descriptive studies, randomized controlled trials, to really understand and document services, needs, and impact.

And that's been part of the work of the Wellness Program. To illustrate, I think about some of the things that we just learned by surprise. When we were resettling refugees from Bhutan, from Southeast Asia, from Africa, we would do universal screening. I wanted that to be part of our programming because I wanted to remove the stigma of mental health. So, rather than say, “Okay, someone looks like they've got needs,” let's ask them, “Have you been sad? Have you had difficulty sleeping?” We said any adult that arrives is going to be asked questions about their health and wellbeing. We would ask you questions about your mood, about your appetite, about your sleep and your relationships with others.

And even with that data, we were able to see trends based on country of origin. How long were they displaced? Where were they displaced? And we used that to inform our treatment modalities. As we started to provide services, we realized that different communities responded to therapy very differently. I think therapy is very much a Western approach to addressing mental health problems and we'd have clients that would come to the first session and they would be supremely polite. And then they wouldn't come back to the next session. And we realized that the one-on-one, face-to-face was just too intense for them.

I would say generally, this was the case with our refugees and asylum seekers coming from Southeast Asia and from Africa, where culturally they're used to being in a collective, they're used to telling their story, their needs within a community-based kind of setting, within groups of people, not one-on-one with someone who's definitely not from their own community. But when it came to other communities, specifically those coming from the Middle East, from Syria and Iraq, what we noticed is that privacy was very important to them. That they weren't ready to share their needs, especially with a stranger who's not from the community. They didn't want to share that with others within their community. And so, we had to tailor their services.

So, what I'm describing is lessons learned that we've collected and tracked to really inform our modalities. Tested the impact of different treatment approaches, whether it's narrative approaches, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, mindfulness practice, we've seen the level of effectiveness. We track our clients based on pretest and post-test to see is their symptom reduction around the areas that they struggle with most, with the hope of always moving them forward on that pathway to healing.

Marina Milaszewska: Hoda Katebi of Because We've Read and JooJoo Azad fashion blog utilizes economic empowerment to improve the refugee experience in Chicago. Her sewing factory in the Chicago area is called Blue Tin Production Co-op and employs immigrant and refugee women who may otherwise be barred from employment due to language or legal barriers. What do you think is the role of economics and personal finance in the mental health of refugees?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: I think it's incredibly relevant that oftentimes, when we think about how people arrive into the United States, we think about their migration story and their story doesn't begin just when they arrive. We think about their experiences abroad, the time in which they are traveling to their next destination, whether that's a week, whether that is decades. And then we think about their experiences upon entering the United States.

For those that we're serving, and I think about the RefugeeWellness program, and I think of who we're serving right now, many of them have been displaced on average 17 to 20 years. And so, when you think about that time, just waiting for a resolution to come to the United States, when they come here, the first priority for them is not to talk about mental health. It's about getting the job. It's about learning the language and rebuilding their lives because no matter where our refugees are coming from around the world, the United States is still a beacon of hope.

They hear about the American Dream, and that is a priority for them. We also know that the policies, the funding that's allocated to US refugees, the State Department, is really not enough. That there is a housing allocation that really is just about three months of housing funds, where there is an expectation that new arrivals are going to be able to become self-sufficient in a very short period of time. And so, there is that driving force to stabilize themselves with jobs, stabilize the economics, and so, it is so critical.

We are lucky that we are in a time where there are more employment opportunities. We have, in the resettlement program, specific services, where we have employment staff that work with local companies, hotels, factories, the airport services, to make sure that they can serve as liaison for those that maybe had been farmers in their own home countries. Because really, the stress of not being able to put food on the table, the stress of not being able to pay the rent is overwhelming and it actually takes priority before they start talking about previous past trauma symptoms. It's in the here and now, and that's relevant survival. I think about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We're not going to get them to talk about past trauma if they're worried about their most basic needs being met. So, very critical.

Aishwarya Raje: Just going back a little bit to what you were saying about the different cultural context that you work with: in addition to managing personal finance and mental health, given the gender breakdown of the populations that you work with, what do you see as some of the unique challenges that women face? Whether they're trying to find employment or accessing mental health services or being a young mother, what are some of the challenges and maybe automatic obstacles that some of the women that you've worked with face?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: Majority of our arrivals are women and children. When we think about those that are forcibly displaced, they tend to be the most vulnerable. And so, in terms of immediate challenges, we've been resettling over the last eight years very large families where dual income is critically important. Those coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, we've got a lot of single mothers. And what's hard in the current workplace is that we don't have standard shifts, second shift, third shift that operate from afternoon to late evening. We have to balance transportation that's available. Standard ordinary typical daycare programs that run from 7 to 6 oftentimes don't fit with the schedule of those that are seeking employment now. And the costs are also quite high for high quality childcare.

So, that's a barrier that's there, but we address that barrier by working with the community. Oftentimes we pair families together so that one parent, one family can watch children while another person takes a shift so that we can work it around some of those barriers so that it doesn't keep people from being able to get a job and to be able to provide for their families.

One of the trends that we've seen is that actually women are finding an easier time getting a job because especially during the summer months, even in the winter months, there's a lot of work around hospitality, and oftentimes they're looking for female employees. Women are not always seen as the viable candidate for factory jobs. It's a lot of hard labor. The challenge with that is potentially changing family dynamics. What happens when in cultures where the women never worked before, now they are the breadwinner? What's the power dynamic that we need to address in the family system as a result of that?

So, I think the challenges look different. They cut across ethnic groups, but in the spirit of looking for gainful employment and becoming self-sufficient, these are challenges, real challenges that directly impact how families function, how individuals function, and also a cumulative impact and the influence on mental wellbeing.

Marina Milaszewska: That's so fascinating how those roles are possibly getting flipped right now. So, for any students who are interested in doing some of the work that you are doing or similar with refugees and immigrants placing a focus on mental health and wellness, what do you think are some important experiences to grasp outside the classroom?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: I would say getting to know the communities, because I've shared a number of the arrivals that are coming to the United States and they're incredibly diverse. And with each community, there are just different belief systems, different cultural traditions, different experiences. And so, to really be able to do this work well, we have to get to the heart of the uniqueness of each family.

I think generalizations are always helpful, but really starting where clients are and recognizing the uniqueness of their immigration story and their experiences is really at the heart of being able to do this work well. I think culture humility is a huge part of what we do. Recognizing that we don't know all the answers, and we've got to be ready to apologize and ask to learn and become partners in this work and recognizing that the people that we serve, they're incredibly resilient. I think when we oftentimes talk about conflict afflicted people, vulnerable populations, forcibly displaced populations, we put them into a box of having needs that they're at greater risk, that we need to pity them in some way.

And what I will say, the stories that I get to hear in therapy, the privilege of being able to serve these populations, they're so incredibly resilient. That they speak 5 to 10 languages in some cases where many of us probably speak only one to two, if we're lucky. That they have overcome insurmountable challenges and yet they're strong, and they're positive, and they're hopeful. And I think we just can't lose sight of the fact that they bring inherent strengths to our communities. And so, what we do in terms of our work with them is really just support them on that pathway to really thriving in a new country.

Marina Milaszewska: As you just mentioned, refugees face trauma due to loss of familiarity in space, place, routines, and family. When you are working with refugees and immigrants as a mental health practitioner, how do you take care of your own mental health?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: Really good discipline. I think that secondary trauma is not something we talk about enough for immigrant and refugee mental health providers. That, to do our work well, we have to be able to be vulnerable and to take in the stories, but there's always a cost to that. And so, for me, it's really putting self-care as a high priority. To not wait to when I start to feel burnt out to the point that I'm not finding joy in the work. To be disciplined in making connection, to reflect on all the gains, to be able to seek services, my own therapy services, reflective supervision, to process what I'm seeing in the field, because really it is about sustaining yourself in the hard work, that's so incredibly important.

For students in the social work program in which I teach, that's also one of the lessons that we emphasize. Self-care, and even more so than that, a focus on mindfulness, that mindfulness is gaining quite a bit of attention, not only as an effective treatment modality for trauma-experienced populations, but for the professionals that are serving them. Learning how to quiet your mind so that you're less reactive and more responsive. I think that's something that's a skill that all of us need have, and certainly part of my ongoing practice so that I can be in the field for as long as I have been.

Aishwarya Raje: And we couldn't let you go without asking a public policy question. So, given the relatively resistant rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration towards refugees, immigrants, we're seeing things like Muslim ban and families being separated at the border. What do you see, especially gearing up for the 2020 presidential election, as the biggest policy challenges facing the issues that you work on?

Dr. Aimee Hilado: Unfortunately, there are consequences to the anti-immigrant heated rhetoric out there, that there are populations that absolutely feel vulnerable as a result of the policies. And so, one of the charges we've put forward to clinicians and all of those that are advocates for immigrants and refugees is to tell the story. Because I think that oftentimes, we don't have an opportunity to control the narrative, that the narrative that's being spewed is one with a lot of hateful rhetoric.

And so, one of the things that we focused on at RefugeeOne is to show the positive side of what immigrants and refugees bring to the community. How they contribute to the economy, how they contribute to relationships, how they contribute to our schools. And the hope is that as we continue to spread this information that, that creeps up into the policy discussion, that they're not seen as a liability, they're not seen as a threat, but they're seen as contributing members of society that pay taxes. They want to rebuild their lives with dignity and safety, and that hopefully the policies reflect the wonderful contributions that they're making to our communities every single day.

Aishwarya Raje: Well, thank you so much Dr. Hilado for joining us and for all the incredible work you're doing.

Dr. Aimee Hilado: Thank you.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter

Reema Saleh: Hi, this is Reema and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast. You’re listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. In this series, you'll hear from experts and practitioners who conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

How do researchers assess the impact of peace building interventions? And what can we learn from examining the existing literature as a whole? My name is Reema and, in this episode, Mwangi and I speak with Ada Sonnenfeld, a former evaluation specialist with the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation.

Ada Sonnenfeld: So, I have a technical background in impact evaluations and other types of program evaluations for international development, with a focus on evaluations and evidence in fragile contexts, particularly peace building and governance.

Reema Saleh: She talks about her work, managing systematic reviews and evidence gap map projects, which can help policymakers make more informed decisions about how to use evidence to make sense of what we know and learn from what has been done before. We discuss her recent review where she and her colleagues synthesize evidence on programs that promote intergroup social cohesion in fragile context. So, first off, what is an impact evaluation?

Ada Sonnenfeld: So, an impact evaluation is an evaluation of a project, program, policy, that tries to establish not only what changed, but what part of that change can be attributed to the policy, program or project. And so, this might be done through statistical means where you can say, using either randomization or quasi-experimental designs, use econometrics, to identify what of that change you can say with some reasonable level of certainty was due to what you did or what you're evaluating, rather than all of the other factors at play.

Mwangi Thuita: Why would someone want to do an impact evaluation? Why are they important?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Impact evaluations help us understand what impact we are having. So, you would want to do this if, for example, you're a government, and you're trying to understand whether your policy to reduce inequality is having an effect on inequality. Or whether your policy to keep more children in school is actually keeping more children in school. Especially for government policies, these tend to be very expensive. And so, you want to make sure that the money that you're spending is having the expected results. Impact evaluations are expensive, so there are many types of programs that may not be conducive for impact evaluation, where it may not be the most relevant type of evaluation. But in general, you would want to do this to be as sure as you can be, that your impact is what you think it is.

Mwangi Thuita: Some people describe the increased popularity of impact evaluations as part of the measurement revolution and development. Aid and development organizations, they now expect impact evaluations for a lot of projects they fund. Does this expectation of evaluation affect the program design? Does it improve things?

Ada Sonnenfeld: There's a lot of things within that question. So, there are definitely more impact evaluations that are happening. 3ie has a repository of impact evaluations that at this point has over 4,000 international development programs and that is rapidly growing. When we look at the number of impact evaluations published per year, particularly around 2009, you see a big uptick in evaluations from lower- and middle-income countries that are published. So, that's great, because that means that we're growing the rigorous evidence base. Whether that means that programs are being designed differently, well, you can either say, “Are programs being designed in order to be conducive to evaluation?” And you also have another question on whether or not they are using the findings from those evaluations in order to improve design. I don't think we can answer either of those questions with any degree of certainty. We work really hard to try and get impact evaluations read and used by relevant stakeholders from implementers, policymakers, other academics working on the topic. But it's hard to track that.

Mwangi Thuita: What definition of social cohesion do you use for the systematic review? I know you said it varies, but what do you use for your review?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Social cohesion has been defined by many people in many different ways. And we adapted a definition from some work that was done by Chan et al. in 2006. And then we added to that some insights from Paletta and Cullen from 2000 and Kim et al. from 2020, which was some recent work that Mercy Corps was doing with the World Bank on social cohesion. So, fundamentally social cohesion is about the state of relationships between people, institutions, government, within a society. And you can think about social cohesion as a universe in many ways. You have the vertical relationships between the state and the society, between government and its citizens. And then you have horizontal relationships about people in institutions within civil society. For the purposes of our review, we focused just on the horizontal element of social cohesion while recognizing that for building sustainable peace, vertical social cohesion is also extremely important.

Within these sorts of horizontal and vertical spheres, you also have different types of ties between individuals and groups, and those might be bridging about intergroup, or across group ties and also bonding, within groups. Again, for this review, we're focused on bridging intergroup social cohesion. So, trying to understand how you can affect the relationships between social groups.

Finally, there are five different dimensions of social cohesion that we identified from those three main sources within the literature. And that is trust, a sense of belonging, a willingness to help, and a willingness to participate and an acceptance of diversity. And that last one, acceptance of diversity, is the one that is probably the most controversial within social cohesion discourse. There are lots of authors who have argued that it is a potential effect of a socially cohesive society rather than a necessary component of it. So, we decided to take a bit of a theoretical stand and say that, especially when you're thinking about fragile contexts, an acceptance of diversity actually does have to be a component of your conceptualization of social cohesion, because otherwise you could think of an authoritarian state that only allowed for a certain type of citizen to live their life freely, as a socially cohesive place.

And I think if people from different groups don't all feel a sense of belonging, then you don't have social cohesion. And it doesn't matter, even in the most homogenous state in the world, there is still diversity there. And whether that's people with disabilities or LGBTQ people or whomever, there are lots of different ways in which people are diverse, and nobody has only one identity. And so, you have to be able to have some level of acceptance for different identities within a community in order for something to be cohesive.

Mwangi Thuita:  What about fragility?

Ada Sonnenfeld: The definition of fragility that we used for the review was a very nuanced one. So, because within a systematic review, we have an explicit ex-ante. So, before we start the review, we say, “This is what we're going to include in this study.” And anything that meets these criteria we'll include. So, we wanted to focus on fragile contexts, and in order to operationalize a definition of fragility that would allow us to screen all of the potential records against consistent criteria, we focused on saying that either it would be in context in which the fragile states index had given the country a score of 90 or above, or it would be in all in lower- and middle-income countries, we're focused only there.

Or it would be a situation in which tensions between two groups were identified as being the driving rationale for the intervention. So, this allowed us to look also, for example, for studies that might have targeted the relationships between two different gangs in Central America, or we included studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are no longer classified as a fragile state, but the tensions between the two groups are still very present in society there. And there's still a lot of work trying to address the aftermath of the nineties. So, we had a definition of fragility that tried to recognize that fragility is not constant, either over time or within a country. And by saying that the focus of the study had to be tensions between groups that either were recently or were seen as at a risk of becoming violent, was the way that we tried to find relevant contexts.

Reema Saleh: What's unique about doing an impact evaluation in a conflict or a post-conflict setting?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Any kind of work that is happening in a conflict or post-conflict setting is going to be a little bit tricky because you have to be cognizant of the fact that your actions are going to interact with the context in a way that might have an impact on the conflict or the tensions or the potential. So, whereas all interventions should have some basic level of making sure that they do no harm, that bar becomes increasingly difficult to reach in a conflict-affected area, because the potential for doing harm becomes increased, because even something that you might think looks like a good intervention at first glance, such as giving vouchers to refugees in an area might have unintended consequences that create harm for those people. If, for example, you don't provide any support to vulnerable members of the host community.

Mwangi Thuita: You and your team at 3ie did a systematic review of impact evaluation literature, which covered 37 papers, I believe, and 31 unique interventions or intervention arms. So, could you tell us briefly about the systematic review, what motivated it and what were some of your main findings?

Ada Sonnenfeld: So, that systematic review grew out of an evidence gap map that we did of interventions that aim to build people and societies in fragile context. And so, the evidence gap map had identified a cluster of programs measuring the effects on social cohesion, but it took a wide range of different approaches in order to have that kind of impact. So, the social cohesion review identified five different groups of interventions ranging from radio dramas and media for peace to classroom, school-based peace education to intergroup contact through sports, to very complex, comprehensive, large scale programs that combined a number of different approaches. Overall, the review identified a pattern of small effects on social cohesion. But that's not really very surprising, because as we've said, interventions in fragile context tend to interact with the conditions for peace, but there's a lot of other factors that go into determining the relationship between two different social groups.

And so, we don't think it's that surprising that a social cohesion intervention alone doesn't have a very large effect on the relationships between groups and fragile contexts. However, we think it's really exciting that we're able to identify a pattern of small, positive effects that you could identify and see that well actually, these programs do have a place in the peacebuilding toolkit. They just are not going to solve all of the problems, which I think makes sense. That's a very headline finding. Within the review, like I said, we identified five different groups of interventions and we looked at the impact within each of those intervention groups. And we found, for example, that radio dramas tend to have on average, a positive impact on trust, and another group of interventions related to comprehensive multi-component programs that included elements of peace education, where they would hold workshops with community members.

And then from that workshop, they would then set up opportunities for people from the different groups to interact with each other, such as through negotiation committees or early warning systems. And then they would add to that an element of economic support. So, a way for people to work together by identifying a program, a small intervention that they could do in their community that would benefit both groups. And those kinds of comprehensive programs, we found an average and positive impact on trust and a willingness to participate. Amongst the school-based peace education interventions, the ones working with children, we identified positive impacts of the programs when they measured effects on the children who participated. There was one study that measured the effects on parents who did not participate, and we didn't find any effects there. And what we think that means is likely that such a school-based peace education program, working with children, might have a lot of capacity to influence how the children and the youth or the teenagers see each other, but that might not be sufficient for changing the way that the adults see each other, and you likely need to engage them directly.

Reema Saleh: So, one of your findings is that standalone interventions may not be enough to build resilient, social cohesion in fragile contexts without complementary interventions. So, what kind of complementary interventions do you have in mind? Is it realistic to expect major changes to group relationships without them?

Ada Sonnenfeld: I think it's not realistic to expect major changes to group relationships only through social cohesion interventions. I think they have a clear role to play, but fundamentally, the drivers of conflict in any situation are rarely identified as purely being about deep-seated intergroup prejudices. Prejudices are held by everybody, everywhere, but they don't tend to turn into violence except when there are other triggers at play. And so, I think having interventions that address those systemic drivers of conflict is very important. What those might look like will vary a lot on the particular context you're looking at.

So, there might be one context where there are major economic inequalities in that striving groups. Or there are even just perceived inequalities between how different groups are treated by the government and that might be driving tensions. In other situations, it may be tensions over the way that land is used. One type of community may want to use it in one way, another might want to use it in a different way.

So, there's often something else that's driving conflict. And that's why it's important to be very cognizant of the local context in which you're working and understand how your intervention may interact with those situations, but also to be realistic then about what you may or may not be able to change. When it says, “We need these complementary interventions addressing structural drivers of conflict,” that is not something that it's likely that any one actor can influence. And that's where you need the peace building community more as a whole, in a given context to say, “These are the different drivers that we can identify.” Is there a way that we can say, “Okay, this funder might focus on this element?” This funder might focus on that one and try and build a program and just coordinate in terms of how you're doing the various approaches, and more coordination might help.

Mwangi Thuita: Your findings also suggest that social cohesion programs that identify bottlenecks to intergroup social cohesion and carry out conflict assessments tend to have a larger and more positive effect. So, this kind of seems obvious, but it's also important to understand whether or not a particular context actually needs an intervention and the lack of relevance or appropriateness to the context can be at least part of the reason for seeing no impact. Did you find that most impact evaluations do comprehensive assessments like these and if not, why?

Ada Sonnenfeld: We're always working within systematic reviews from a place of imperfect information. So, what we do in order to identify the papers is we do a really extensive search of academic databases, websites from different actors, such as the World Bank and relevant implementers and donors. And we try to find all of the impact evaluations that we can that meet our criteria. And then we do an additional search for every study that we find that meets our criteria to identify other documents written about that program, to help us get as much information as we can about what they did. But we often can't find that information. And so, while within our study, we found only one or two impact evaluations that were clearly based off of conflict analyses and based on context assessments, that doesn't mean that none of the others did that. It just meant that we weren't able to find those studies and they didn't mention having done them.

So, just with that caveat in mind, I did think nonetheless, that it was surprising that very few of them mentioned having been based on conflict analyses, but I don't know if that's just because it wasn't reported or if it actually didn't happen. To your point as well, in terms of why they may not do that or why they may, I think it is surprising, but I also think it's not uncommon. It's not unique to social cohesion interventions or peace-building interventions. Other work that I've done for other types of interventions in fragile and in non-fragile context has also identified a similar finding around how often the bottleneck seems to have been misidentified. And that might relate to the fact that the intervention was wrong, in the sense that they were trying to implement something that wasn't needed in that context. But another potential source of that is that what they were measuring might not have been quite right.

That's where things get really complicated, because what social cohesion means is very context dependent. And so, you can take the example of Nigeria, where we had four different studies that took place in Nigeria, and two of them measured farmer and pastoralist communities, one targeted Christians and Muslims, and the third targeted people from different ethnic groups in the country. And so, those are three different types of social cleavages that different interventions were targeting just within a single country. So, what the social cleavages that you're targeting and how your intervention changes perceptions across that cleavage, is going to be very context dependent, and then how you measure it will also change. So, what it means, for example, to measure acceptance of diversity, a lot of people looked at whether or not people had friends from the other group, but they measured that in different ways. And they didn't always measure that in ways that were necessarily relevant.

And that's really tricky because maybe one way to deal with that is to say, “Oh, well, let's all measure the same thing.” but then, what if what you're measuring doesn't make sense for that particular context? So, you end up in this situation where there's an issue with bottleneck identification, but it's hard for us to say whether that's because they didn't do good baseline assessments of what the conflict dynamics were and what the needs were or whether it's because they weren't measuring things quite correctly. All I can tell you is that we couldn't find evidence of conflict assessments having been done. And we think they probably would be useful.

Mwangi Thuita: Given that social cohesion is often very contextual, so if you need a theory of social breakdown in each case that you're looking at, which involves contextual information – does that have implications for how generalizable the findings of impact evaluations are across the board?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Absolutely. I think one of the conversations that we've been having with Ray and with a lot of other actors who are looking at social cohesion as a way of working towards sustainable peace in fragile contexts, is that there's a need for a framework that is general enough that everybody can say, “Yeah, this is what we mean when we're talking about it,” but that the indicators can be hyper contextualized. And so, that you know where on your framework your indicator feeds in, but the indicator itself is based off of the local context. And that might help us move to a place where we can say, “Okay, this change in this context represented a big leap in the relationships between the two groups.”

Whereas in this context, all they measured was something that actually was quite a small step and that can help having a sense of where something maps onto a common framework would help us interpret the findings across contexts and help us better figure out how to use the findings from one impact evaluation in another context. Because that might say, “Okay, this evaluation, this intervention in this context actually had a really big impact on trust.” And maybe that helps us see why and how we can take that to another place.

The realist in me likes to always say that interventions themselves can't be replicated, but mechanisms can be transferred. And what we mean by that is the design will always have to be contextualized of your intervention. But the reactions that your design is trying to trigger in the people it targets, you can try and learn from that. So, if you can get people to work together collaboratively, that's a mechanism that you might be able to replicate, even if the way that you get them to work together, and the context, the setup might be very contextualized.

Reema Saleh: Do you think that evaluations are useful for testing assumptions about how development interventions affect change?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Yes. [Laughter] I do think they are useful for testing assumptions. I think they're very useful. Specifically impact evaluations can give us a lot of information about that, but it depends on how the impact evaluation is designed. I think increasingly we see impact evaluations being theory-based and using a theory of change. And that's incredibly important because that means that they have thought about. “All right, in order to get to social cohesion, these are the steps that need to happen.” And then you can see if, for example, you find a positive impact on an early-stage outcome, but not on a later stage, you can see where your theory of change might break down and then you can test your assumptions to try and see why that might be. Some really clever impact evaluations have done specific tests of different mechanisms to try and see what was driving change. And those are really interesting.

But you still have a lot of programs that just measure those sorts of high-level impact outcomes. And then you don't really know what goes on in the middle. And that's what we often call the black box of a randomized controlled trial, for example, is a classic one where you don't really know why you're seeing the results you're seeing. And so, what we would say is that that's why mixed methods are so important. You have your statistical methods to answer one part of your question, but that alone is likely not going to be enough without some kind of process evaluation, qualitative information, trying to see why you're seeing those results to help you interpret them correctly.

Mwangi Thuita: Would you say that these impact evaluations do a good job of measuring intermediate effects?

Ada Sonnenfeld: I would say that very few of the studies in our systematic review measured intermediate outcomes and effects on intermediate outcomes. So, whether they are capable of doing a good job, yes, they are very much so, but it's not often that they do. And that's I think really where I would like to see the field moving towards is “Okay, we're getting to the point where we recognize that having a theory of change is really important for any type of evaluation, impact evaluations and other types, because it can really help structure what kinds of questions you ask.” But what I often see is that evaluations, even where they have a theory of change at the beginning, will not revisit that theory of change after they have their findings to say what do these findings actually mean for my theory of change? Do they validate it? Do they challenge it?

Do they suggest actually it should be refined in this way? And maybe this is what the theory of change should look like. So, I often feel like that last step of closing the loop. And “All right, here's our initial theory of change.” This is what we thought was going to be happening. We measured outcomes against X, Y, and Z steps. So, intermediate steps and final impact outcomes. This is what we found and they'll often leave it at that. But that can sometimes be difficult if they then don't tie that back, because it can be really hard to interpret why you might see positive effects on some indicators and null effects or mixed effects on others. And so, you really need the researchers who are working with the program team. They're the best place to then say, “Okay, what does this mean for the theory of change?” And that will also help us when it comes to understanding how the findings from that study might inform future studies as well.

Mwangi Thuita: And one thing that I think was intentional in your review is you don't include interventions that aim to build sustainable peace by providing economic support for things like job training. So, like cash transfers also. Could these be some of the complementary interventions that you were talking about earlier?

Ada Sonnenfeld: Yes and no. I mean, the reason that we didn't include those was not because we don't think they are a relevant approach to building social cohesion, but rather it's because the evidence gap map that I mentioned earlier actually identified a large number of ongoing studies of cash transfers that are trying to measure outcomes on social cohesion. And so, that would have meant that, for us to have synthesized that literature now would be a bit premature because there are so many ongoing studies, those findings would change within the next two or three years. And so, that was the rationale behind excluding those from our study. I think it will be really interesting to synthesize that literature in about two or three years, not right now. I mean you could right now, but it's likely to change.

Whether or not those address underlying drivers of contentions between the communities, I think is a slightly different question that that synthesis will probably have to answer. Cash transfers can be really important in humanitarian aid context and in addressing short-term needs. Whether they are the structural changes that you need in order to shift the situation for those communities in the long run is a question that's still open.

Reema Saleh: I was curious why there were a lot of countries that never had impact evaluations.

Ada Sonnenfeld: Why that might be?

Reema Saleh: Yeah. I was curious kind of why it's kind of uneven.

Ada Sonnenfeld: It's very uneven. I mean, the evidence gap map is maybe a better source of that than the systematic review, but you can see there that some of the analysis we did, there's not an obvious correlation between, for example, how fragile a country is or how much ODA it receives, how much official development assistance it receives, and how many impact evaluations there are. You have quite a large number comparatively of impact evaluations from Afghanistan and DRC than plenty of other places like Syria that receive a huge amount of ODA. And Yemen. So, I don't know why there haven't been evaluations in those places. That's not a question that our research was able to ask. You would have to do a lot of stakeholder research and asking all of the different donors and all of the different universities why they don't research those areas.

But what we try to do is just say, hey, there's some really important geographic gaps where we don't have rigorous evidence. And maybe hopefully people will read the evidence gap map and see that and say, actually it would be really beneficial, not just to our own programming, but to the global evidence-base to build evidence from those less well-studied contexts.

Mwangi Thuita: Yeah. Well, thanks. Thanks Ada so much. Thanks for all your time.

Ada Sonnenfeld: You're very welcome.

Reema Saleh: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Ada Sonnenfeld. This episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Kumar and Reema Saleh. Check our show notes to access the full report discussed in this episode. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Eduardo Ortiz: Hi, my name is Eduardo Ortiz, and you are listening to University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast.

Root of Conflict Introducers: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. You'll hear from experts and practitioners can conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research Institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Aishwarya Raje: The relationship between illegal financial flows and state level of violence is present in conflicts around the world and is especially pronounced in Afghanistan. In particular, the country's thriving drug market based on the opium trade has proven to be a major economic factor that has been fueling the ongoing conflict. My name is Aishwarya Raje, and in this episode of Root of Conflict, Mwangi Thuita and I speak with Gretchen Peters, Executive Director of the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime. Drawing on her role at CINTOC as well as her decades-long career as a writer and journalist, Gretchen talks through why the political economy of the war in Afghanistan is so poorly understood, as well as the connections between criminal networks, weakened institutions and breakdown into disorder.

Mwangi Thuita: Gretchen, thank you so much for joining us today.

Gretchen Peters: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Mwangi Thuita: So, to start, can you tell us about the Center on Illicit Networks and Transnational Organized Crime, and what your role as Executive Director of the organization looks like?

Gretchen Peters: Sure. I had worked for several years as had my colleague and co-founder Kathleen

Miles. We had both worked as consultants to the Defense Department and to U.S. law enforcement.

And what we realized was that a lot of efforts to fight organized crime and violence around the world were perhaps well-intentioned, but were having the opposite effect than wasn't what was intended, and we felt that it was important to establish a center that would be focused on fighting the systems that support crime and corruption. The corruption had to be taken into account in any program to counter organized crime. My 20 years or so working as a journalist before I became a consultant to the U.S. government, I worked as a journalist for many different parts of the world.

And what I found was that what was often the dominant narrative of why people were fighting

each other in conflicts that never ended, whether it was Sunni's fighting with Shia, or Muslims fighting Christians, or some other thing that was going on, was really just a smokescreen for powerful forces that were often funded by elicit activity, that had in many cases, corrupted powerful institutions of the state or had in some places that I've worked, replaced the state or certain aspects of it, either as insurgents or warlords or just major power brokers that sort of operated from the shadows. These shadow economies prevented the violence and the conflict from going away because the shadow economies depended on the lawlessness for their business to go well. A good example of that would be the opium trade in Afghanistan.

I'm convinced that one of the reasons that peace process after peace process collapses is because there are so many constituencies that benefit from the horrific continuation of violence there – they don't want the war to end. There's almost always a spoiler that takes out the peace process, just when it's starting to reach progress. More recently, Kathleen and I have done a lot of work in Africa

and what we're seeing there, it's distinct from Afghanistan, but we're seeing these often foreign

criminalized forces coming in and really hollowing out institutions of states, in multiple countries.

It's been sort of most famously documented in South Africa with a state capture by a number of groups. But the most famous was an Indian family that became very close to the former ruler. But we're seeing similar things, and in some cases, it involves East Asian and generally Chinese groups. In some cases, there's been Russian groups. We've tracked the involvement of Iranian and Lebanese criminal groups in other parts of central Africa, and they almost seem to operate from the same playbook. It's fascinating to study but the impact it has on societies is devastating. It implicates education systems, the economy, healthcare, all sorts of stuff get negatively impacted by it.

Mwangi Thuita: And on the topic of Afghanistan, in your book, Seeds of Terror, you illustrated a really vivid picture of a thriving drug market built by the Taliban, where they make millions of dollars every year from the opium trade. Can you talk us through the political economy of this conflict and why you think it's so poorly understood or poorly represented, when we talk about the war in Afghanistan?

Gretchen Peters: One issue that I think is most poorly understood, and this is not unique to

Afghanistan, we've seen the same thing in places like Mexico and Columbia and other parts of the world, is that human beings have the intuitive response of fighting crime and fighting problems where they see them, where they're most visible. And the most visible aspect of the drug trade – well, there's two aspects that are visible. One is the farm areas where the crops are grown, and another area is if at the other end of the drug supply chain, if there are people dying and there's street markets and corners, where drug dealers sell drugs, those are the visible things that law enforcement tends to go after. But often, the real power brokers that control the supply chain, they're certainly not the farmers in any drug, and they're certainly not the guys selling dime bags on street corners. They're the traffickers who are in the middle, and in particular, they're the folks that finance this trade and those people almost virtually never go to jail. Occasionally, you might see law enforcement arrest a drug kingpin, and certainly, there've been a number of drug kingpins in Afghanistan, like Haji Juma Khan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, Haji Bas Mohammad that were arrested and have been in those three cases brought to the United States to face jail time. But the money around the Afghan drug trade has virtually never been investigated.

I've done consultations with U.S. intelligence. I've met with the Brits about this. It's quite clear that the money related to the opium trade, which is billions and billions of dollars annually, is not under a mattress in Kandahar. Some of it is in Pakistan and Iran, some of it is in the UAE and banks in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. But quite a lot of it is in Europe, it's in the United States. I, at one point, when I was working for the DOJ and the Defense Department, I mapped out a money laundering operation that the Taliban were running that extended as far from Afghanistan as Northern California. And nobody had ever looked into the financing of the Taliban beyond Afghanistan. And that's a ridiculously myopic view of how that insurgency is financing itself.

If we’re looking beyond what's going on in Afghanistan, we're not understanding the full scale of how the Taliban as an organization - and the Taliban has many different factions so I’m simplifying a bit – but no one's getting a full picture of how the insurgency finances itself without looking at the full supply chain that is funding the insurgency through drugs and other criminal activities. Some factions and within those factions, some commanders within the Taliban are making the enormous amount of money from supporting and facilitating the drug trade, or in some cases running drugs themselves. And other parts of Afghanistan where there's not as much or no narcotics grown, we see insurgent commanders funding themselves through kidnapping regimes, through controlling illegal mining operations, through all sorts of extortion rackets. And again, this is common to insurgencies around the world. This is not something that is unique to Afghanistan, and it's also important to acknowledge in Afghanistan that there are a lot of warlords and local commanders that are on the government’s side that are engaging in the same criminal activities. And so, the people stuck in the middle are the Afghans, ordinary Afghans that are just really between Iraq and a hard place. And it's a tragedy.

Mwangi Thuita: Can you walk us through the process of tracking and mapping these networks and maybe

some of the political hurdles that come into play when you're trying to disrupt the flow of money and undermine these criminal operations?

Gretchen Peters: Yes, that's quite a big question. So, in terms of how we map these organizations, we first start out usually by reading as much as we can that's available in the public record or depending we're working with the government, they might have government reports that aren't available to the public that we're able to read or to look over. So, we first try to learn as much as we can. We then try to figure out from those documents and public records, who seems to know about what's going on and who we can speak to. And then we will go out and conduct typically dozens of interviews, usually structured interviews to try and figure out. We have about a 12-page set of interview questions that go through the different phases of a criminal supply chain, or really any supply chain, to understand how goods move in one direction, how money moves, and how financing of transactions occurs.

We will then, to what extent possible…[…] it depends on the commodity, for example, we've done a lot of work trying to understand the illegal ivory trade between Africa and Asia. And so, we've looked at drug seizures and mapped out down to who owns the trucks that delivered shipments that later turned out to have ivory in them, tracing back the license plates, and then, the ownership of who owns the home where the truck was registered, to see if we can start to piece it together. And some of it will be deadends, but sometimes, eventually, I should say, we're almost always able to put together a picture of who we believe the criminal network is. And then that also provides   us with more leads of people we can speak to.

So, this can often in and of itself be a six-to-nine-month process. To map something like that out can take an enormous amount of time. And when I was writing Seeds of Terror, and I was trying to map out the Taliban, or my understanding of the Taliban, that was about a five-year process. And over the course of that process, it became less and less possible to function and to operate in some of the areas where I needed to be. And so, I fortunately had worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a long time. So, I was able to do things that many foreigners wouldn't be able to because I had local friends and they would take me in. So there reached a point when the guys I was working with said, well, we can't drive you down there unless you sit in the backseat and wear a burka.

And then they started saying, well, you can't come down. We're not going to be able to take you in there. We can't take you in there, but we can bring people out or we can't take you in there at all, or it's just not going to happen. And in those cases, I would then send one of my local research assistants to conduct an interview. but we did have to be very careful, and it created significant barriers to the project. But one thing that I have found really in most places that we've worked, I mean, as long as we have trusted local researchers and partners that we're working with…people are so frustrated by this, in any place we've been, nobody likes to live in a place that is infested by crime and corruption.

People often ask me if we're scared to do this work. And the answer is of course. Sometimes it's scary and we're very nervous about going into a place or meeting with a certain person. But I'm more scared about not doing anything about this and not trying to figure it out and not trying to figure out solutions. I'm more afraid of what's going to happen to our planet and our communities if we don't. And so, we have been very, very lucky, but I think part of it is that we are in there earnestly, trying to figure out how the system works, and people seem very grateful to talk to us. And we haven't ever exposed anybody that didn't want to come out, so I suppose that helps us too. But over time, we then are able to build a map to say, these are the roles and functions in the supply chain that move commodities.

And then we created a separate map, usually going the other way. When I say map, I mean like a

diagram. It’s often laid out in a combination of like Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, just because those are programs that lots of people have. We've used network analysis programs as well, but I mean, I can do it with post-its and string on a wall…it’s just to sort of show the progression and to explain how stuff moves from one place to another, and how money oils that system. What we found in a number of places…I did a project a few years ago in Gabon, in Central Africa, which was really interesting looking at the ivory trade. And I was working with the Gabonese government and their national parks and the anti-poaching unit within their national park system.

And we spent months mapping out the poaching gangs, I guess you'd call them the criminal groups that were poaching elephants. And then on top of that, we mapped out the networks that were

exporting ivory, and they were also in many cases, exporting rosewood and other endangered

timber. And what we realized, the Gabonese commander and I, what we realized was that he and his guys were going out into kind of remote jungle areas that were dangerous, if nothing else,

because there's yellow fever and Ebola and etc. but also armed poachers. And within days, they would be arrested. And so, then we set off in a project to map the corrupt networks that existed on top of the criminal supply chain.

Because what was happening, was that every time they'd go out and launch an operation to arrest

Somebody, within three or four days, they'd be released on some technicality. And so, we were later able to map out all the judges and more senior officials that were on the take and the country. It was a really fascinating project. And I spoke to him, I think it was about six months ago and asked him how it was going. And he said, “It’s still very difficult,” and I said, “Well, what’s your biggest problem? Is it crime or corruption?” And he said, “Without a doubt, it’s the corruption.”

So that's become in many ways for me, more of a focus than the criminals themselves. If you have a government that's clean, that's functioning effectively, criminals don't really have much room to operate. Corruption really is the grease that keeps the machine going.

Aishwarya Raje: So you talked about the importance of having local friends and working with

local researchers. And I think often times in academic circles, when they talk about conflict resolution, it's told from a very kind of high-level analytical perspective, and often misses out on the perspective of local voices and local communities. So, can you share some experiences that you've had with local communities that you've worked in, whether in Afghanistan or anywhere else you've conducted field work that perhaps challenged what you thought you knew about the conflict, or made you think about the conflict differently?

Gretchen Peters: Yeah, totally. I mean, first of all, I'm alive and in one piece today because of my local colleagues in multiple different countries. The number of times I have been physically rescued or pulled out of a situation when it started to turn, I could maybe count on two hands the number of times that's happened. But I certainly would not be alive today if it weren't for my local friends and colleagues who in many cases were taking far greater risks than I was to, to go out in these communities and ask these questions. I think one of the things that was hardest for me to understand at first was the extent to which you can have battlefield enemies in a place like Afghanistan. But we also saw this in the Balkans that were literally killing each other by day and yet at night would be collaborating to traffic drugs.

And so, that was something that took me a long time to get my head around, and yet I've learned that it's incredibly common in conflict that enemies will still get along when they need to. When there's opportunity for money to be made, they will find a way to reach a solution. And I think it's an important lesson for us in terms of peacebuilding approaches, that you have to understand the political economy of conflict, and if you can help opposing sides reach a solution that is economically acceptable to them, where both sides are going to make money or both sides are going to see themselves getting some kind of financial slice of the pie at the end, where their communities and their backers will be supported financially and will be able to survive. It can provide you a pathway towards some sort of conflict resolution.

Mwangi Thuita: That’s a great segway into my next question, which is about how to deal with the conflict elite. So, in Afghanistan and with respect to the Afghanistan war right now, there are peace talks going on in Doha that are attempting to resolve this dispute and pave the way for a U S withdrawal. Now, I mean, the chances of that actually happening, many people would say are low. But from your perspective, in terms of incorporating what we know about the political economy of conflict, why is it important to think about a peace dividend for the conflict elite, when sometimes it seems like there's more pressing, more important issues?

Gretchen Peters: Well, it's a really good question. And I’m also impressed when anybody else uses terms like conflict elite because it's something that I obsess over, and that I think that a lot of people think about or even identify, but it's certainly a case in Afghanistan, that that was a country that many of the power brokers, many of the conflict elite are precisely that. They became powerful as a result of the conflict and their families or their tribes were not powerful before. And so, they will potentially see themselves as losing influence, losing income at the end of the conflict. So, I think one of the most important things to do, whether you're trying to investigate, say, our messed up

healthcare system in this country, or why a conflict is continuing in a place like Mozambique or

Afghanistan, nothing seems to solve it.

For me, the first order of business is to figure out who's benefiting from it continuing to happen, Who’s making money off of the conflict and the perpetuation of the conflict. And if you can get those people who are benefiting from it to agree for it to end, then I think you're on the road to recovery. Even if you can just figure out who they are that’s benefiting from it, you're halfway to a solution, but in Afghanistan, I think we're seeing now with the explosion of violence that's happening, and in particular in Helmand province, which is the number one province for producing poppy in Afghanistan, that there's forces at work that don't want this peace deal to go through. They're not complying with the ceasefire.

So, I don't have a lot of optimism about where this is going. There’s going to have to be some kind of settlement with the Taliban, but I don't think a settlement that involves bringing the Taliban into the government is a good idea. So, I think that the international community should be negotiating with Afghanistan's moderates, of which there are many, instead of their violent drug trafficking extremists of which there are few. So, I think it's unfortunate the decisions that have been made around the Doha Accord.

Mwangi Thuita: In closing, I want to ask a broader question about how you see the causal relationship between the kinds of illegal financial flows that we're talking about and violence and disorder. That is, after all, the theme of this podcast. So, do you think it's more the case that the criminal networks are simply exploiting weakened institutions that have brought about civil conflict and violence, or do their activities actually precipitate a breakdown into violence and disorder?

Gretchen Peters: I think the issue you're talking about goes in both directions. I think that the illicit financial flows can both be part of the asymmetric warfare campaign for insurgent and violent groups.They can help to finance attacks. They can help to finance corruption. They can have a very corrosive impact. Plus, the strength of insurgent or criminal gangs perpetuates or pushes the belief among the community that the government is weak and ineffectual. I think that the illicit flows can have a very damaging impact on a variety of levels. The other issue is that, and there's a group here in D.C. called Global Financial Integrity that does a lot of really good work tracking this issue, but it lists that financial outflows from a lot of countries in the developing world, in particular, they've done some really great work in Africa, are often 7 to 10 times higher than aid and development inflows and foreign direct investment. And so, at the same time that there are efforts to try and stabilize unstable countries, the outflow of cash is really just sucking the place dry, sucking its bone marrow out.

Aishwarya Raje: Well Gretchen, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Gretchen Peters: Thank you. Aishwarya. Thank you Mwangi.

Aishwarya Raje: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Gretchen Peters. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of the series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit the Pearson institute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Nadia: This is Nadia and you're listening to University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast.

Root of Conflict Interviewers: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. You'll hear from experts and practitioners can conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research Institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Aishwarya Raje: The war in Afghanistan has ravaged on for decades and peace negotiations between the Afghan government and Taliban officials during that period have often broken down, time and time again, with a number of foreign actors involved in the conflict and in the negotiations, the most prominent being the United States, reaching a comprehensive peace agreement has proven to be exceedingly complex. But now, with a new set of negotiations taking place in Doha, we may be seeing a window of opportunity to make progress towards peace. My name is Aishwarya Raje, and in this episode of Root of Conflict, Mwangi Thuita and I speak with Laurel Miller, the Asia Program Director at International Crisis Group. Laurel discusses the intricacies of the war in Afghanistan and how they've evolved over the years, and the best-case scenario for what a peace agreement can look like. Laurel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Laurel Miller: My pleasure to be with you.

Aishwarya Raje: Your topic during the Pearson Global Forum was, of course, a case study on Afghanistan, which is undoubtedly a very complex conflict. We could probably do an entire podcast series just to talk about it, but can you give us, or lay out for us who the main players have been in this conflict? And from a U.S. perspective, how have our goals in Afghanistan changed over the last 20 years?

Laurel Miller: Sure. And, and I should say I came to this position at International Crisis Group already having focused quite a bit in recent years on policy issues related to Afghanistan. It's one of our priority areas within my current job, which I've been doing not even for two years now, but, had done some analytical work of my own when I was at the RAND Corporation related to Afghanistan.

And I also served in the U.S. State Department from 2013 through the middle of 2017 as the deputy, and then the Acting Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and was working on issues related to War and Peace in Afghanistan at that time. So that’s what I drew on in my presentation at the Pearson Forum, and in other work that I do. So, the conflict there, it's multi-sided and complex, and it has both internal and external dimensions. Often, from an American political and popular perspective, we think of the war in Afghanistan as the war that has been there since after 9/11, after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and toppling of the Taliban regime there. And that is one dimension of the war, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan at the end of 2001, because the Taliban regime had harbored Osama bin Laden and had refused to hand him over.

The U.S. took the position at that time that it needed to not only endeavor to capture or kill bin Laden and his associates, but also make an example of the Taliban regime in order to say that, state sponsorship, state harboring of terrorists will not be tolerated. So, one dimension of the conflict in Afghanistan is that the United States invaded and gradually built up the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan over several years. After having wiped away the Taliban regime, it was one of the key actors in installing a new government there, putting in place a new constitution, elections, et cetera. But then the Taliban regrouped, from safe havens in Pakistan. Across the border from Afghanistan, the Taliban regrouped as an insurgency and the United States then became embroiled in a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban.

So that's one dimension. Rolling a little bit back further in time, Afghanistan was not a fully peaceful place before 9/11. There had been a civil war in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union withdrew from the country and the U.S., which had been heavily engaged in supporting the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, including bin Laden, decided to exit the region and the country descended into a civil war in the early 1990s, which then created the opening for the Taliban to sweep to power and hold power in the later part of the 1990s. The Taliban had by and large consolidated control of the country, but not complete control of the country, and there were dimensions of warfare that were still going on related to that fight even before the U.S. invaded after 9/11.

And so, there's a war still going on in Afghanistan that has a lot to do with what was happening in the 1990s, even before the U.S. invaded. That's another dimension and layers to the conflict in Afghanistan. And then, Afghanistan also is surrounded by some meddlesome neighbors, it's in a very difficult neighborhood. The key players in this regard are both Pakistan and Iran, but others too have over many decades sponsored, favored, proxies and clients in the country, and have, have helped to perpetuate warfare there through these relationships. And as I mentioned, Pakistan, in particular, is consequential in that it gave safe haven to the retreating Taliban figures who then regrouped as an insurgency. And so, there's another dimension to the conflict and the set of actors in Afghanistan that has to do with the external players within the neighborhood, not to mention the United States and NATO as external players further afield, and Russia and China too have interests and involvement in Afghanistan. So, it's a particularly complex conflict because of these both internal and external dimensions that overlap, but also represent distinct sets of interests on the part of all of these players.

Mwangi Thuita: So, what has changed in the last few years, so that there's now more of an emphasis on a negotiated settlement as opposed to achieving a military victory, as a precursor to U.S. withdrawal, even though there's still, like you mentioned, during your panel, a low likelihood that, a peace agreement will be agreed upon and implemented properly.

Laurel Miller: So, I think you have to look a little bit back in time to see how the U.S. came to this point of being focused on negotiating a settlement and negotiating directly with the Taliban. Initially in Afghanistan, the U.S. saw itself as being initially after the invasion as outright victorious, militarily. It didn't capture bin Laden. He famously escaped and later was caught and killed in Pakistan. But the U.S. did very quickly topple the Taliban regime over time and was able to pretty much decimate the Al Qaeda presence in the region and saw itself in those first few years after the invasion as having really utterly defeated the Taliban. From the time when the Taliban began to reconstitute as an insurgency, gradually, certainly by 2005, 2006, it was clear that there was an insurgency.

I think it's fair to say from that point on the war from a U.S. perspective has never gone well. The U.S. from that point began to increase the number of forces steadily. Even before Obama came into office, there were already a series of surges. And then there was what was literally called a surge in the beginning of the Obama administration, to at the peak, there were 100,000 American forces deployed in Afghanistan. In 2002 it was like tiny numbers, a few thousand at most, and then to a 100,000 American forces in Afghanistan at the peak, plus NATO forces for a total of between 140 and 150,000, plus in any military deployment like this, you then have to multiply several times more contractors, including doing military-like tasks in addition to this number of troops on the ground.

The reason why the numbers kept going up is because the war wasn't going well, and the U.S. saw the U.S. military advocated for the application of more resources to try to turn it around, to change the trajectory. From the peak period, already by 2013, 2014, the number of U.S. forces was diminishing because the idea was that the surge of forces in the Obama administration was supposed to be temporary, and so there was a plan to surge up and then come down. And at the same time, there was an emphasis placed on building up the capabilities of Afghan security forces to take the lead in the fight against the Taliban, but still with the U.S. engaging in counter-terrorism efforts. But even with this sort of peak, and then initial decline of U.S. forces there, it was never really turning around.

The Taliban was steadily gaining ground and even with the enormous devotion of American resources to building up the Afghan security forces, they still hadn't and still haven't today proven capable of entirely on their own handling the counterinsurgency without American backing. From around 2015, when the number of U.S. forces really began to dip, it became even harder for the Afghan security forces, and there were even more gains by the Taliban. And even today, with the numbers of U.S. forces almost down – by next week, it's supposed to be down to 4,500 – obviously the Afghan forces are carrying much more of the burden of the fighting, much, much more, but still, in really the most exigent circumstances, they need American military support, particularly air support, meaning they need the bombing of Taliban positions in order to not be overrun by the Taliban.

And the Taliban has continued to improve its position. So that's the trajectory of the war fighting. And I mentioned that in answer to your question about the peacemaking, because it's the explanation. If the U.S. had been militarily successful in partnership with the Afghan government, and eliminating the Taliban insurgency, then I don't think anyone would be talking about a political settlement, or they'd be talking about one that's really just negotiating the terms of the Taliban surrender. But that's not the case. There are many people who think if the U.S. started being serious about a negotiation much earlier, it could have negotiated on much more favorable terms, but as the Taliban has gained strength, we are nowhere there in negotiating the terms of the Taliban surrender. It was more than a decade ago now that some American policymakers recognized that the war was not winnable and that there had to be an effort to begin trying to negotiate a political settlement of the conflict.

But for many years, that effort was in fits and starts. It was, “We're going to keep going with the war effort, and this is something we'll do on the side.” And it doesn't usually work out very well if you don't put something that hard at the center of your efforts. And so, it was very ebb and flow of attention to this, changing more affirmatively, more concertedly in the direction of trying to negotiate a political settlement only around the end of 2018. Even in the Trump administration, for the first year, there was a mini-surge, again, trying to turn around the war and negotiate from a position of strain. It didn't happen that way. There wasn't a positive change from an American perspective in the war, and so, efforts were redoubled in early 2018, not coincidentally, because you have a president who campaigned on and seems to still want the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a policy priority.

Aishwarya Raje: So, given that context, how consequential is the upcoming US presidential election going to be on the peace process? What are some differences we could expect from four more years of Donald Trump versus a new Biden administration?

Laurel Miller: Yeah, the short answer is very consequential, potentially, even though I'm not expecting a major change of direction if Biden wins. If Trump wins the second term, then based on the recent trajectory of the policy efforts, as well as the recent public statements by Trump himself and the tweets and his national security advisors’ comments, which suggest a plan to reduce U.S. forces even more by another half, down to just 2000, around there by January. I think that's a pretty safe bet that that would continue and that the ability of U.S. diplomats to try to negotiate a decent political settlement will be much reduced if Trump wins, because the policy will be a policy about troop deployments, not a policy about Afghanistan. I think Trump has pretty clearly shown that, because he said he really doesn't care about Afghanistan.

He doesn't see the risk or threat there, or issues of U.S. credibility, or what do allies think about, it's really just about troops, no troops. And so, I think that you would see a push to just make as fast and dirty a deal as you can, so that you least have a fig leaf for a complete withdrawal. If Trump loses, we have a question as to what happens in the period of time while he's still president after that loss. And there, I think we're all expecting if Trump loses, to have all of oxygen sucked out of the air by litigation of what the result of the election was. He's already relitigated it. So, people post litigate it too.

And so the question in my mind, then is, did he just lose interest in what he said about Afghanistan, and it's all really just about litigating the result of the election, literally and figuratively litigating, and is Afghanistan just off the radar and forgotten about, and nothing happens between that and the inauguration? Or, does he decide he's just going to burn it all down? And now, his legacy is “I said I was going to do it, and now I'm just going to do it.” That's possible to be too. I think the bureaucracy would have ways of slowing down anything serious that happens between the election and the inauguration, but not necessarily to a great degree. So, there's a lot of uncertainty about that period. If Trump loses and, we get through the November to January period without too much happening with the status quo being essentially preserved, then I think there's an opportunity for the Biden administration to do a bit of resetting, first of all, to kind of re-energize the peacemaking effort, which is right now, pretty much stalled because of the U.S. election – other factors too - but neither side of this negotiation is foolish enough to think they can count on what will happen after an American election.

So, they are being very careful. We're not going to take any risk by entering into any agreements that they're not sure about. So, things are stalled right now because of the election, and if they stay stalled, there'll be an opportunity for Biden administration to re-energize its peacemaking efforts, to maybe repair some of the gaps, to probably take a little more time and be a little more orderly about it. I think they will still be focused on peace process, but the issues themselves are not going to get any easier, and the prospects of ultimate success in a peace negotiation are not going to be orders of magnitude higher, even with a more orderly American foreign policy.

Mwangi Thuita: So, there've been some efforts to imagine alternative histories of the war in Afghanistan, how U.S. strategy could have been implemented a bit better. Last year, Harris professor, Ethan Bueno de Mesquito wrote in the Boston Review that we were always going to lose the war in Afghanistan because, and I want to quote him, here, “Counterinsurgencies are wars of attrition. Wars of attrition are won through resolve and the side facing an existential threat will always have the greater resolve.” He suggested that what could have been a successful, narrowly defined counter-terrorism operation became an unwinnable counter-insurgency moving forward. Do you think the U.S. has learned the right lessons about counterinsurgencies?

Laurel Miller: I largely agree with what you just described from that position, but with some caveats, because I'd want to know what that alternative looked like to getting embroiled in the counterinsurgency. To say we just go in, we talk with the government, and then we say, see you later, that doesn't work particularly well either in terms of stable outcomes. So, there there's a lot to unpack about what that alternative history really looks like. In terms of whether the U.S. has learned the lessons, I'm not sure at all. I don't think the lessons have even been drawn fully yet about Afghanistan, much less learned. And what I think we've seen happen in recent years within the U.S. military establishment is simply sticking your fingers in your ears about counterinsurgency. It's like, “Oh, we just don't talk about counterinsurgency, we don't do counter-insurgency anymore. We're not going to do it again. So why should we bother to think too much about what went right and what went wrong?” I’m exaggerating slightly. The military does have its procedures for doing lessons learned, but it's only a partial exaggeration. There's just been such a rapid swinging away from the notion that we're ever again be in a counterinsurgency, just like happened after Vietnam when it was “Well, we're not going to do that again.” And then lo and behold, we did do that again. That inhibits really learning the lessons. What I do agree with is the idea that the United States could be a successful counter insurgent in Afghanistan, without the Afghans themselves being successful counterinsurgents. That to me is highly problematic.

And if you look at the literature about counterinsurgency doctrine and the supposed success stories of counterinsurgency, that the doctrine is drawn from, the successful examples are not of external powers being the primary counterinsurgents. They are of the internal power being the successful counterinsurgent. And so, to me, that was the fundamental flaw of the U.S. strategic approach to the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, was the idea that without the Afghans, that we could be the primary determinant of success in the counterinsurgency. Now, I don't mean to suggest that no one paid attention to the Afghan forces – there was also an effort to build up their capability – but I think there was a lack of realistic appraisal of how quickly and successfully you are going to be able to build up the indigenous Afghan capability to fight the counterinsurgency.

Aishwarya Raje: So finally, in the context of the peace process, you've talked about how any peace deal being brokered in the immediate future is highly unlikely, but what would a successful peace deal look like for Afghanistan? Part of the answer might be depending who you ask just based on the number of actors that are involved in it. But, let's say for example, if we look at Afghanistan and the U.S., how do we align our best-case scenarios?

Laurel Miller: Yeah. So, first to be clear, I'm a proponent of the peace process in Afghanistan. And I think the chances of success are not zero, and the payoff is high enough that the efforts should be made. Even if you can't say that the likelihood of success is high, from an American perspective, I think the bottom line needs to be what the Afghans themselves can agree to. So, I don't think the U.S. should be that particular about what some of the details of a political settlement look like, even in terms of issues like hot-button issues, like women's rights in Afghanistan. Now, I feel comfortable saying that because there's enough diversity of voices and participants that I don't think that anything that the current Afghan government would agree to would be too compromising on issues like that. But I don't think that the U.S. should have red lines about what the exact nature of the state and governance looks like.

Let’s imagine for instance, that the state structure that emerged looked like Iran. Should we really have a negative view on that? It would be better than Saudi Arabia, if it did, just to be realistic, it would be better than any of the monarchies in the Gulf that we're perfectly friendly with. It would potentially even be not worse than Turkey. So, to my mind, the highest value is in ending the violence and enabling Afghans to live their lives in relative peace. And, from an American perspective, I think that in terms of the details, of what the structure of the state and governance looks like, there's a lot that should be sacrificed for that highest value.

Aishwarya Raje: Well, Laurel, you've been very generous with your time today. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Laurel Miller: Well, it was my pleasure to join you. Thanks for that.

Aishwarya Raje: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict, featuring Laurel Miller. Special thanks to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support of this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's research and events, visit the Pearson institute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Taylor Griffin: Hi, my name is Taylor Griffin and you're listening to the University of Chicago Public Policy Podcast.

Root of Conflict Introducers: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. You'll hear from experts and practitioners can conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research Institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Mwangi Thuita: Climate change will affect rich and poor countries, but poorer countries are predicted to pay the greatest human and economic cost. In this episode, we interview Amir Jina, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy researching how economic and social development is shaped by the environment. He uses economics, climate science and remote sensing to understand the impact of climate in both rich and poor countries. In our conversation with Professor Jina, we discuss how shocks to the water system could impact conflict patterns, and whether it's even possible to identify a causal relationship between conflict and climate change. We also discuss his work at the Climate Impact Lab using state-of-the-art empirical methods to study the effects of climate change.

Aishwarya Raje: Professor Jina, thank you so much for joining us today. So, to start out, can you just set the scene for us? Broadly speaking, why do we talk about environmental issues as a potential root cause of conflict, and looking at water, specifically, which was the topic of your Pearson Global Forum panel, what does water conflict mean and what kind of conflict are we talking about?

Amir Jina: So, I think fundamentally why we make this connection is that lots of conflicts, maybe all conflicts, arise as disagreements over resources and access to resources of various kinds. And while they don't have to be environmental resources, that's one of the main ways in which different societies will derive some kind of value or wellbeing. So, we have a situation where water, in particular, is fundamental to so much of what we do as a species, in terms of making our food, for example, that as that resource would start to get scarce, a conflict might inevitably arise or cooperation might arise for that matter, but there's potential in that, in the presence of that scarcity, for some kind of conflict to arise. I think that's why we make that link. One of the points that we had tried to make during the Pearson Forum was that there's a naive idea that this could be people standing around the lake because it's getting smaller and smaller and they're literally firing guns at each other over this dwindling resource, but it's never truly that simple. And one of the things which makes it both a fascinating intellectual problem, but then also a really difficult policy issue, is that the connections are sometimes really obscure. And some of those links are really hard to understand.

Mwangi Thuita: Yeah, I really enjoyed that part of the panel. We know that it's notoriously difficult to disentangle the effects of extreme weather, things like higher temperatures, longer droughts, more intense storms from the other political and economic factors that are making conflict more likely. I think one of the examples given was Syria, which took place against the backdrop of a drought across a large part of the Middle East which caused migration from rural to urban areas. You have an increasing number of unemployment in the context of rising political instability. Do you find terms used to describe the impact of extreme weather caused by climate change, such as catalyst, trigger, threat multiplier, do you find those helpful in understanding how and communicating how climate change affects conflict?

Amir Jina: People who are concerned with security, national security have really attached themselves to this phrase of a threat multiplier. And I think then it becomes from my point of view, a useful communication tool, partly because there is always going to be a debate about how fundamental issues of climate or the environment are in causing conflict. But I think it's a little bit more easy for people to understand that even if it's not the ultimate and direct cause, it almost certainly has the ability to be approximate cause of some kind of issues that we'd see. And so, the threat multiplier language is very useful from that point of view. It's not something that I would talk about. It's not a phrase that I would use so much within talking to colleagues about this, where we would probably try to drill down a bit more and understand specific mechanisms, or refer to something as being – and this is going to be very kind of wonky academic speech – but we'd refer to something as a reduced-form relationship, if we don't understand the mechanism,  and we're pretty comfortable talking about those reduced form types of relationships. And then we would drill down into the mechanisms, but in an abstract sense, particularly outside of talking to those people who work on this issue in a research context, it's pretty useful to be able to say, is this something where threats might exist and you know where those threats would be, where you know what a whole other set of risks are?

And what we're talking about is something that might amplify risks. The other useful part of it is that it doesn't immediately dismiss. And in particular, I think it kind of respects the knowledge of people who actually deal with and are concerned with conflict on the ground, because it's saying, you know what these threats are. And this is one extra thing: it's not the academics coming in and saying, I'm going to tell you what's going to cause this conflict, when there's a whole set of political and social context that people working on conflict and in a day-to-day basis will know much better than most academics can ever try to know. So, I think it's super useful from that point of view and I think it shows a little bit of respect and deference to the people who actually are doing more to deal with the consequences of conflict in a real policy sense.

Aishwarya Raje: So, one question around understanding how water and conflict are related. It feels like it often comes back to the lack of comprehensive data around the issue. And I know that's something that came up during your panel during the Forum. And I'm wondering: Is there a push to produce more data as a means to eventually build more effective policies, and whose responsibility would it be to collect and produce this data? Is it local governments? Is it researchers such as yourself? Is it private sector partners? Is it a combination? How should we approach this problem?

Amir Jina: Yeah. So, I think where data becomes useful is in this sense, I guess, taking a step back: What is the actual link that we would see? So, I said, it's very stressed resources, so water supply decreases for some reason. There's a first step, which is just making that connection. So, between weather and conflict, there's an extra step there, which is saying, “How much worse was this in the present day because of climate change?” And that's a really hard thing to do. Something that's a little bit easier is to say, “Let’s take projections of climate change and see if this relationship stays the same, or how much worse, usually worse, but could also be better, but how much worse or better is that going to be in the future?” And so, making those steps and connections along the way to even establish those relationships, we do need data to start. We need data on the conflicts. We need data on people's wellbeing on their health, on socioeconomic status. We need data on what the drivers here would be, which is water access, weather, et cetera.

The really difficult issue with large-scale interpersonal conflict, is that they now are often happening in places without a lot of data on or a lot of environmental monitoring. So, one of the reasons why this research has exploded in the last few years is because there has been a big push towards measurement, broadly speaking, of the environment, of climate, of weather, and bypassing issues that are particularly tricky, like in across all of Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, very few permanent weather stations. There’s a handful of airports, but there's nothing like the density of weather measurements that you would get in the United States. Rivers all across the United States have gauges, which tell us what the levels are, what the volume of water flow is, and you just don't get that in a lot of other parts of the world.

So, there's been innovations there on using satellites, on using models of physics of the climate of trying to work out what the weather is in each location. We've been filling a data gap slowly. It's being incidentally attached to understanding conflict, because the reason that those models are being made is because of people doing climate research or environmental research, and they develop some global data sets. And then the people who had this problem of saying, “Well, I wanted to understand the environment-conflict link in this location, where I had no measurements before,” suddenly they have some access to data. So, we're kind of riding on the coattails of a lot of other well-funded science to do this. And so, often those exact measurements aren't exactly what we would need to understand the issue. So, coming back to your point then, we're kind of getting lucky at the moment in terms of there being access to data on the environment side.

And then a few groups are also measuring conflict in a better and more consistent way. Now we can go online and scrape news reports for different conflicts and try and build up our databases in a more consistent way. But for this resource to a conflict link, I think that the level of data that's required to understand the mechanisms part, but also to think about using this information we know about this relationship for early warnings, that's not really there yet. And so, what do we need, coming back to your question? What do we actually need, and whose responsibility is it? In an abstract sense, hopefully it would be the responsibility of anybody who's negatively impacted by that conflict because there's some incentive there, that you should say, “Yes, we should learn about this.” Monitoring efforts are pretty expensive to set up, particularly in the old-style way that you would have in somewhere like the United States or parts of Europe.

And so, we're relying on more innovation to try and make cheaper sensors, cheaper river measurements, cheaper pollution measurements, so that we actually can fill in the map in terms of what's measured and what's not. And so ideally, this would be something that governments would be able to support, but then we enter the issue that comes up when you're thinking about conflict or economic development, which is “What's your priority in that location?” If you are a place which is prone to conflict in the first place. where it's hard to do data monitoring, where your population might be poor, is putting in a set of weather stations or river level gauges actually your highest priority? And the answer is probably no, there's more pressing things. And so, even if it is the government's responsibility, it might be very low on their list of priorities. And so, that's where private agencies, researchers, the international community, does need to step in. If we believe that this is a major issue, then somebody needs to step in and do it because the resources just don't necessarily exist to do it at the national level in a lot of places where we'd really want to monitor this.

Thanks for that. So, you're part of the Climate Impact Lab, which brings together social scientists and

climate scientists to try and figure out how much climate change is costing society and who's paying what. What are you able to achieve working collaboratively between social scientists and climate scientists together that you might not be able to do alone?

Amir Jina: So, yeah, my background was actually that I started off as a physicist, then a climate scientist, and then fell into economics almost accidentally. Someone told me about a paper by Esther Duflo, who was the second woman to win an Economics Nobel prize. And this was 10, 12 years ago. And prior to that, I had a very narrow and biased view of what economics was. I thought it was investment banking. So, seeing this paper about the welfare effects of a government pension refund in South Africa on granddaughters of women who got this transfer, that to me was kind of mind blowing. So I moved from climate science more into economics. And I've tried to keep those two things together, as much as I can.

The drawback of that or that the difficulty with that is it's pretty hard to try and be an expert in one thing, let alone an expert in multiple things. And so, early on, I had to give up the idea that I'm going to be an expert in these two things, but that there's very few people sitting at this intersection. And what that allowed me to do was have a language to be able to communicate with both of those fields and to try and bring together a larger group. The benefit of that is that we're in a situation where, for questions like this environment and conflict question, where insights from more than one discipline are actually important, for the issue of conflict and for a lot of issues dealing with fundamental questions of human wellbeing and how we interact with each other, the question becomes more important than the discipline that you are situated in when you ask that.

We should be focused on solving or understanding a certain problem. And that means trying to get ourselves out of the silo that we're in intellectually and seeing what are the tools that are needed to solve this problem. And so, I think the benefit that comes from working with the Climate Impact Lab, the reason why it's somewhat organically evolved into the thing that it is, with as you said, computer scientists and economists and climate scientists and others, is that it allows us to stay focused on a problem and bring together the resources we need. And sometimes it's true. We do need, if we want to understand, for example, uncertainty and what the future is going to be like, we need real climate science there to tell us, but we also need the economists to say, well, here's what we understand about the link to the economy. Here's what we understand about this aspect of the economic system. And currently, the climate science is not seeing this part and the economics is not seeing what the climate science can do.

So, we actually need to find some bridge in between these, and it's allowed us, in doing that to solve questions in a way which we think is more focused on the actual policy actions you could take. So, to do this in a way which is really hyper-local, we can get this all over information all over the world, right down to the equivalent of the county level in different countries. We can do a full quantification of uncertainty, which I think is useful for investments, or if you're thinking generally of your climate risks, broadly, it helps to know what your average change might be in the future, but it also helps to know what your 1 in 20 or 1 to 10, your risk of change might be, so, what the full distribution is. I think that's what this collaboration has allowed us to do.

Aishwarya Raje: So, as a follow-up to that, I feel like often times in the world of academia, which of course you have much more experience we do, it's easy to get caught up in looking at really highly consequential and urgent issues like climate change, public health, poverty, as intellectual exercises, or as things that are intellectually interesting rather than as issues that affect people's wellbeing and livelihood. So, given your role in the Climate Impact Lab, or just in general, how do we make sure that we're not just researching for researching and actually taking into account the human factor with these issues?

Amir Jina: This is absolutely something that I wrestle with if not on a daily basis, than an almost daily basis. And I think I spent a lot of time early on in my research career doing long stints of field work. Sometimes particularly in development economics, that can be…the interactions there with the place that you're studying can actually be quite short, but I would try and go for as long as possible and spend a few months in a place and try to learn as much as possible about the people who were being affected by the thing I was trying to research. And partly, that did two things. One was to make sure that I understood well. And I think a lot of the really good development economists that I look up to, do have, even if they don't write about it in their papers, sometimes they have this really in-depth knowledge of the places that they're working in.

And they have people who they work with there, who are living there full-time from those locations that are able to provide context when needed. The other thing that it helps to do is when I sit down and see some data points or some data set on a different outcome, it helps me try and connect that. It's something that I have to consciously do, but helps me try and connect it back to some of the stories that I remember from sitting in a focus group in a small village in Bangladesh or somewhere, and try to remember there's enormous consequences to getting these answers right in this information. So, that's the one aspect of this. I think the other part is recognizing that there's kind of an ecosystem right in this. So, I'm a researcher because I derive some kind of enjoyment from finding out new things.

And I think that's true of most academics. There's some reward to just thinking deeply and understanding something. And that might be what motivates us to some extent. I think most of the people, particularly at a policy school, are also motivated by solving a real problem. One of the things which we've tried to do with Climate Impact Lab, and I think some of us tried to do generally is to make sure that we recognize there's a broader ecosystem around that knowledge system. There are people who will be able to use it. There are people who might rely on that information. There are people whose lives will be improved by finding out answers to different questions, and to make sure that we don't just sit in our offices on our computers, writing the papers, but actually get nudged towards what the important question is.

Mwangi Thuita: Speaking of visiting developing countries, I saw that you you've been to Kenya. I saw some photos on

your website.

Amir Jina: Yes, I have. My father was from Tanzania actually.

Mwangi Thuita: Okay, I’m from Kenya!

Amir Jina: The thing which I didn't realize for years was my father grew up in Tanzania and they had actually moved to Kenya originally from India in the 1800s. But my name, my last name, means name in Swahili. And so, when I landed in Kenya for the first time, on my immigration form, I wrote down and said, Jina, and then I wrote Jina after it. And the immigration officials found this so funny, and one guy cracked up and he called over the guy next to him and said, “This guy doesn’t know what he's doing.” I was like, no, that's really my name. They looked at my passport, everything. But yeah, so I have a connection to there. The work in Kenya was actually part of working with the United Nations, with UNICEF and the United Nations environment program. There was a small network of people at African universities trying to think about climate adaptation, particularly this youth initiative that was starting.

So, part of it was, “I'm trying to support this,” and then, a few people went there and, and kind of helped with the knowledge sharing that was related to that. So, I think it’s another one of those things, actually that even though I don't have research from there at that time, the connections that I made and some of the things I got to experience in different community conservation projects, for example, have actually stuck with me a lot. And those are some of the things which provide the motivation or at least some context for why I continue to try and sit behind my computer and sometimes boring work of doing the papers.

Mwangi Thuita: So, you earlier said that although we know that there's an effect of shocks to a water supply and conflict behavior, that we don't know much about the mechanisms. Specifically, I think during the panel, you said that shocks to water systems are increasing the risk of conflict by about 5% to 10%. First of all, can you just explain it in simple terms? What do those numbers mean? What does that mean?

Amir Jina: That was coming from a paper of a coauthor of mine who had done this broad meta-analysis of about 6 different research projects at all different scales, and looking at what the climate conflict link was. Standardizing those making sure they controlled for all the unobservable differences that might lead to problems in that interpretation, so that you could interpret those causally, and then looked at the average effect of those. And what they found was this one standard deviation change in precipitation. So not really in the lake access or something like that, but just a precipitation shock led to this, this 5% difference. So, that was a very specific thing. It's hard. So, I'm fairly confident that we can interpret those things causally because of the way we set up the observational data.

But we set up the experiment with our panel data and our fixed effects and all the things that become important for turning this interpretation into a causal one, rather than just correlational. I think what we would need to understand exactly what those mechanisms are, is in some cases, just a lot more data, a lot more research, but also in particular, a lot more understanding of the effect of certain policies, either directly related to conflict or not. So, there's this fascinating paper about the monsoon in India and looking at crime rates due to changes in the amount of rainfall that happened during the monsoon in India, and it found that there was a relationship between less rain and more crime, and then it looked at the rollout of this Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which was an act in the mid-2000s, which gave guaranteed labor for people or days of work for people who were unemployed.

So, for example, if there was an agricultural shock, their crop failed, they could go and get access to work for pay. And so, it was this work guarantee act. The way that that was rolled out across the country wasn't exactly random, but it was turned on in some states at certain times differently. And this research paper, by a guy named Thiemo Fetzer, found that the relationship between rainfall and conflict almost completely disappeared. And that tells us a lot about what might be happening behind this mechanism. This is something saying, well, if we know that this is related to employment. What's the main source of employment that's being targeted by this policy? It's agricultural employment, to make sure that people don't end up unemployed or losing money that comes from either being a landless labor who's employed on a farm or having your own crops fail if you own your land.

That allows us to say, well, we've identified a little bit more what the source of that link could be. It's down to the food supply, but more than just the food supply, it's down to people's ability to make money. The amount that people were getting for this for this extra day of work wasn't actually that much money. So, it shows potentially how desperate people had gotten that they would engage in this really risky crime conflict behavior in order to make up for that loss. And it tells us quite a lot about the actual household budgeting decision that goes into what might make somebody engage in a pretty desperate activity. And so, I think it's situations like that where we can understand the role that certain policies play, where we know the policy targets a certain specific mechanism where we start to learn a lot more, but that's a slow process of building up information. The ideal would be that we could then see this, learn something from it and say, “Okay, maybe the environmental conflict nexus,  instead of focusing on ending the conflict once it happens, why don't we think of something like a social safety net as being that conflict reduction policy?”

Mwangi Thuita: Well, thank you. Thank you so much for your time and also for the important work you're doing. It's very interesting and of course important.

Amir Jina: Thank you both so much.

Root of Conflict Introducer: Thank you for listening to this episode of Root of Conflict featuring Amir Jina, this episode was produced and edited by Aishwarya Raje and Mwangi Thuita. Thank you to UC3P and the Pearson Institute for their continued support for this series. For more information on the Pearson Institute's events and research, visit thepearsoninstitute.org and follow them on Twitter.

Root of Conflict Introducers: You're listening to Root of Conflict, a podcast about violent conflict around the world and the people, societies and policy issues it affects. You'll hear from experts and practitioners can conduct research, implement programs and use data analysis to address some of the most pressing challenges facing our world. Root of Conflict is produced by UC3P, in collaboration with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict, a research Institute housed within the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

Daniella Choi: Hello, my name is Daniella Choi.

Daniel Vallejo: And I'm Daniel Vallejo and we are so excited to have Dr. Rebecca Wolfe and Maurice Amollo with us. Rebecca is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and she's a renowned expert on political violence, conflict and violent extremists. Maurice is the Chief of Party for Mercy Corps Nigeria’s country office. The two of them have worked together for a long-time developing programs and conducting evaluations on conflict mitigation.

Daniella Choi: On this episode, we highlight Mercy Corps program in Nigeria called the “Community Initiatives to Promote Peace. It's a multi-faceted program aimed at building bridges between pastoralists and farmers by engaging community and faith-based leaders, coordinating social assistance, and strengthening conflict mitigation networks to promote peaceful coexistence. We talk about the intergroup tension between the indigenous and non-indigenous populations as a root of conflict and how this identity-based conflict is widespread around the world. We also discussed the disruptive effects of COVID-19 and social distancing measures on implementing this program, which is based on building trust and social cohesion.

Daniel Vallejo: Dr. Wolfe and Maurice, thank you for joining us today. We understand you're focusing on mainly two groups, addressing the conflict between two groups, so if you could talk a little bit more about these two groups, the difference between them, or why this conflict arose.