Buchanan Initiative for Peace and Nonviolence

Moderator: Ambassador Taylor is the Executive Vice President of the United States Institute of Peace. This conference began six years ago with a grant which Johnson County Community College wrote and received from the U.S. Institute of Peace for this conference. One of the reasons we wanted to invite him here is that we wanted to say “thank you” for the money and what it started.

Earlier, Ambassador Taylor was the Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions in the U.S. Department of State. He oversaw assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Syria. He served as the US Ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. Ambassador Taylor also served as the US Government’s representative to the Mideast Quartet, which facilitated Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. He also served with the US government in Baghdad in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and he was the coordinator of US assistance to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Early in his career, he served on the staff of Senator Bill Bradley. Ambassador Taylor is a graduate of West Point and of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He served as an infantry platoon leader and combat company commander in the US Army in Vietnam and in Germany. Ambassador Taylor is married with two adult children. Please join me in giving him a big Kansas City welcome.

The Institute of Peace

Ambassador Taylor: Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you, it’s great to be back in Kansas City. I was here not that long ago. I’m very pleased to be reminded that the Institute of Peace had some role in getting this conversation going, and it’s a dynamic conversation that I’m thrilled to be able to come back and participate in, so thank you all very much for the invitation back.

Thanks to Steve for starting us off with this big picture on peace-building.

The Institute of Peace, where I work, is an organization in the US government that Congress established so that there would be some place in the government that thinks about how to resolve conflicts peacefully. As Jeanette mentioned, I spent some time early in my career in an organization in the US government that thinks about how to resolve conflicts violently. The Congress wanted a place — the Institute of Peace — that thought about how conflicts can be resolved through dialogue, through negotiation, and through a better understanding of how conflict works.

A lot of the pieces of the Institute of Peace I will save for any questions you have, but the theme that I was asked to talk about are stories from the field.

As Steve said, there’s an importance and a value in measuring what we do, so that we can show that it is possible. Our motto at the Institute is “Peace is possible, it’s practical, and it’s important for our national security.” But it is possible, and we need to show that if you work hard to understand the conflict, then it’s possible to have some effect on them.

We do this work on peace-building in a couple of ways. We do it from what we call “the bottom up” as well as “the top down,” and I have an example of each approach. The “bottom up” is working at the grassroots, on the sources of conflict, on what leads societies, peoples and communities to want to solve disputes violently. We also, however, work on the “top down,” which is often at the national level, so I’ll talk a little bit about the work that we’re doing in Afghanistan at the national level. Later on, there’s some work we’re doing in Ukraine. There’s a conflict in Ukraine where the Russians have invaded part of their country. We’re working on the top-down version of that as well.

When we were talking about stories from the field, I was coming in last night and Matthew reminded me that the theme this morning was “Stories from the Field.” I was telling him, “I’ve got a few stories from the field.” This is great for me to be able to tell such stories. He said he’s got stories from the cornfield! Matthew, you’re sitting way over there, but you should come here.

Matthew: It’s a safe distance.

Ambassador Taylor: It’s a safe distance, but you don’t need it. This is a peaceful organization here.

Iraq

Let me tell two stories — one from the bottom-up, and one from the top-down — getting to Steve’s point about measuring results and telling people, here in Kansas City and other parts of the country, what we do. Because we want to be sure that people in the world, and in particular in this country, understand that some of their taxpayer dollars go to fund the Institute of Peace. As I said, the Congress established us in order to do this kind of work, so I want you to evaluate if you’re getting your money’s worth on it.

So let me start with Iraq. One of Steve’s measures is recognizing the limitations of some of these listings that you pointed out. It’s a good point, but Iraq is either 157th or 158th — it’s down in the bottom group. Afghanistan is down there too, but I’ll come back to them. This is one of the places where there’s not positive peace, where we’ve got problems since about 2003.

Part of the problem in Iraq emerged in about 2014, so this is the beginning of my story about the field in Iraq.

In 2014, you will remember that ISIS moved quickly through northern Iraq, overran many of its cities and military formations, and set up a Caliphate in the northern parts of Iraq and Syria. One of the cities that they overran was Tikrit, which you may remember was where Saddam Hussein came from. It was a largely predominantly Sunni city, and ISIS, being a predominantly Sunni organization, overran it and a nearby military base near Tikrit which was once used by the US Army, which they called Camp Spiker.

By this time, in 2014, you will recall that US forces had been drawn way down — we had essentially withdrawn. ISIS moved in, took advantage of that, overran Tikrit and Camp Spiker, which was left to the Iraqi military as a training base, using the facilities and infrastructure that we had put in there. It was turned over to the Iraqi Army and Air Force, where they established a training facility for their young Air Force cadets.

It turns out that most of those young cadets were Shia from the southern part of Iraq. As I mentioned, Tikrit is a Sunni community. So when ISIS overran Camp Spiker with this training base established by the Iraqi Army — mostly Shia — ISIS massacred 1,700 cadets. It was a horrible massacre that we didn’t find out the full effect of until we went back in there, but this massacre was obviously traumatic, as you can understand.

Fast forward about six months, when the Iraqi army, together with Shia militia reinforcing each other, pushed ISIS back out of Tikrit and Camp Spiker, and eventually out of Iraq, allowing the Iraqi Army to regain control of the city and the camp.

As I mentioned, Tikrit is mostly a Sunni community, but the Iraqi Army’s soldiers were mostly Shia. The Sunni community in Tikrit was terrified. They were glad to see the ISIS forces pushed out, but they were also worried about revenge killing for that massacre.

The Institute of Peace has had offices both in Baghdad and Erbil, in the Kurdish region, since 2004-2005. What we’ve done — and Steve highlighted this as well — is we’ve been able to partner with Iraqis, and with them established non-governmental organizations and other organizations that work on reconciliation, negotiation, and facilitate dialogue. Those are the mechanisms and tools of peace-building.

During the time that the Institute of Peace has been in Iraq, we have identified, trained and worked closely with the Network of Iraqi Facilitators, or NIF. These are Iraqis who work in their own communities. They have their day jobs, then they also work with us. The training has been useful.

When the ISIS forces were pushed out of Tikrit, and the Iraqi government and military were ready to take back control of Tikrit including Camp Spiker, our folks recognized that there could be real problems with revenge killing. The symptom of that problem was the Sunni community around Tikrit was so concerned about revenge killing that they left their homes and went to other parts of Iraq where they thought they would be safer.

Our folks went in and said that this is something that we — the Institute of Peace — through our Iraqi partners working closely with us, could do something about. Our people, who know the region, people, politics, culture, language and history, are the people who can do some work for peace-building. This is bottom-up, grassroots work.

Our people went in and first sat down with the Shia tribal elders, who essentially represented a lot of the military forces — the Shia militia that I mentioned earlier — who had come in after ISIS was pushed out, and were in a position to have some influence on the militia and Shia tribes in the region. They sat down and had conversations with them. They also sat down separately with the Sunni tribal leaders and elders in the region. This went back and forth for some time. As Steve also said, some peace-building work is slow and may take time, and this did.

Eventually, after having conversations one-on-one here and there, we got them together in a series of discussions and facilitated dialogues, and in the end worked out an agreement. The agreement was that the Sunni tribal leaders would offer up those members of their tribes who were implicated in the massacre, and would turn them over to the Iraqi criminal justice system. In return, the Shia leaders agreed that they would not take tribal revenge, which may have and has happened in the past.

That agreement was a great outcome. It was not foreordained, nor was it obvious that it was going to happen. There have been these kinds of problems around Iraq for exactly this kind of dynamic. We’ve had opportunity in a lot of these places. We’ve seen some of them work and some of them not, but this one did.

The measure of its success — and Steve, this gets to your point about how we can demonstrate it — is 350,000 Sunnis who had left Tikrit and were internally displaced around Iraq came back. They had enough confidence that they were not going to be killed out of revenge that they could come back and begin rebuilding, which they are.

That’s one small example. We’ve done this in other parts of Iraq with the same kind of dynamic, but that is the kind of work that peace builders can do, using the tools of dialogue and facilitated discussions, where you have to build some confidence, you have to recognize the grievances, you have to have a joint understanding of where you’re trying to go, and then a way to sit down and do this.

Hang on to that bottom-up thought in this two-part discussion of stories from the field.

Afghanistan

The second one is the top-down one from Afghanistan.

A week and a half ago, I got back from a trip to both Kabul, Afghanistan and Islamabad, Pakistan with a delegation from the Institute of Peace. The Institute of Peace is guided by a board of directors who are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and have to be made up of half Republicans and half Democrats. We at the Institute aren’t going to go off in one direction or another — we are going to be in the mainstream of US foreign policy and security policy, because we have this bipartisan Board of Governors.

The chairman of our board is a man named Steve Hadley, who was the national security adviser to President George W. Bush. Steve Hadley is one of the unusual people in Washington these days who is respected by both Republicans and Democrats, but even within the Republican Party respected by both the Trump faction and traditional Republicans alike. Steve Hadley — we call him an “asset,” so I’m not telling you stories here. He is greatly respected, and he works with us really closely. He’s a busy man, but he comes over once a week and sits down with me and my boss, Nancy Lindborg, the president of the USIP, and we go over a range of things having to do with how we’re going to run USIP, personnel decisions and policies. But we also talk about big national policy.

This is the point about Afghanistan: Steve Hadley gets involved, lends himself and works with us on a project trying to find a negotiated solution to the war in Afghanistan. He’s particularly well suited to do that. While he was in office under George W. Bush, we know what happened during Iraq and Afghanistan. Steve knows this issue. He oversaw a lot of the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He and I, and the vice president for Asia in the Institute of Peace, spent this time first in Kabul, Afghanistan, and then in Islamabad, in order to take the next step to push toward a negotiated settlement.

I am not going to tell you — and you wouldn’t believe me if I did — that the Institute of Peace was the only reason that the US government is now looking seriously at a negotiated outcome for the war in Afghanistan. I’m not implying that. There were many people, within the government and without, who were saying for a long time that we had to negotiate with the Taliban. We’re not going to win militarily. Steve Hadley and I had gone there a year and a half ago and came back with recommendations to the Trump Administration on their new strategy for South Asia.

Hope in Afghanistan

We recommended something that they were inclined to put in there anyway, which was a dual-track strategy. While we had to keep pressure on the Taliban, we also had to negotiate. There will not be a military victory against the Taliban. The administration put that in their strategy a year and a half ago. Just last week, we got back to evaluate that strategy and see if it will be put into effect, and we came back with some hope about the war in Afghanistan.

You don’t usually hear the words “hope” and “Afghanistan” in the same sentence. This war has been going on for 17 years. If you pick up a paper today, there will be articles, op-eds and recommendations from people saying we need to get out, it’s not worth it. That argument says it’s hopeless.

I’m here to tell you — and I could be proven wrong in a year — I understand that there is a possibility of a negotiated outcome in Afghanistan, based on what I saw with this group, with Steve Hadley and our delegation last week. That gives me some hope.

Let me tell you a little about that, and then I’d love to get your thoughts. There are probably people in this room who are skeptical about this observation, and I would love to have this conversation, so hang on to your skeptical thoughts and I will lay this out.

First of all, one bit of evidence is for the first time in 17 years, last June, there was a spontaneous ceasefire. It wasn’t negotiated. It came after a religious holiday, Eid. Both sides agreed to abide by it and they did. That was an amazing thing. Both sides put down their weapons and neither side — the Taliban and the Afghan Army/NATO alliance — attacked the other during this time.

In three days, there were no violations. Not only that, in this three-day period, the Taliban’s fighters came into the cities where they don’t have control. The Taliban controls the rural areas while the government generally controls the urban areas. The Taliban put down their weapons, came into the cities and celebrated with Afghan soldiers. You had Taliban soldiers and Afghan soldiers riding around on motorbikes, waving flags, taking selfies and eating ice cream together.

This was an amazing demonstration of a couple of things: one, it’s possible to have a ceasefire. There’s a real need for some kind of peace. Both sides are tired of this war, which gets to the point about how it may now be possible to negotiate it out.

That’s one data point on our side. We are now genuinely convinced, where we haven’t been before, that negotiation with the Taliban is what we should do, have to do, and are doing.

Negotiation with the Taliban

Many people in this room recall or continue to hold the view that you can’t negotiate with the Taliban — that these are terrorists and murderers who have killed many Americans and Afghans. That was an official US government view for a long time, but it no longer is. The US government has decided that it’s not going to win this war militarily, which was not the official view as little as a year ago. It’s probably still not the view of some people in parts of the US government. Nonetheless, the US has now come to the position that we are going to negotiate. We’re not going to try to win the war militarily, we’re going to negotiate with the Taliban, and we have some ideas about how to do that. That’s a big change. It’s a change on the battlefield with this ceasefire, and a change of policy on the US side.

I’m telling you about stars that are kind of aligning here, and one of the stars is the Afghan government. The Afghan government, president and political parties are preparing for a presidential election to be held on April 20th. In previous elections, none of the presidential candidates ran on a platform of negotiating with the Taliban. They held a very hard line — they were pretty convinced that if they trained the Afghan National Army better with support from the international community, having them more able, capable, and mobile with helicopters, better training and pay, then they’d be able to eventually win.

There are three main presidential candidates in Afghanistan right now — there will probably be a lot more by next April — but the three main candidates, one being the incumbent President Ashraf Ghani, and then two others: Doudzai and Hanif Atmar, each putting together their platforms, coalitions and tickets, like a president and a vice president from the Tajik community, or another vice president for the Uzbek community and another vice president from the Hazara community, in order to try to win support across the political landscape of Afghanistan.

All three of these candidates are running on peace, each trying to convince voters that they can bring peace to Afghanistan better than the others. President Ghani is trying to make that case. Hanif Atmar, who used to be Ghani’s national security adviser, left him, and he’s now putting together a platform to try to make the case that he can bring peace and negotiate with the Taliban better than Ghani. Yet a third one is doing the same thing. This is an indication of what I said earlier about the need for an end to the war — a war weariness that is being reflected in their politics.

There is one last star that I think is coming into alignment, and that’s Pakistan. While we were in Kabul and had these conversations with all three of these main political candidates and a bunch of others to hear about what’s going on in Afghanistan, we then went down to Pakistan. As people in this room know, Pakistan plays a major role in peace in Afghanistan — some positive, some negative. There are people who are absolutely convinced, and it’s probably true, that the Taliban have a sanctuary in Pakistan. The Taliban can go across into Afghanistan, fight and kill people, then retreat back in and be protected by Pakistan. Pakistan does not deny this but claims they don’t have control over them, so the Pakistanis have not played a positive role in the past on solving the issue of conflict in Afghanistan.

However, we sat down last week with the new prime minister, Imran Khan, who was a famous cricket player. He’s 50 years old, but very fit, charismatic and confident, and he told us in our meeting with him, “Mr. Hadley, you can’t imagine how important it is for there to be peace in Afghanistan. We are desperate for peace. Our economics are terrible. We need stability on that border so that we can rebuild our economy.” But they’re much less concerned about Afghanistan than they are about India, and Khan was saying that they’re desperate for peace in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Khan’s foreign policy advisers and representatives from the Foreign Ministry who were in the room for this conversation were cringing. This wasn’t the message that they wanted their Prime Minister to give to this visiting American delegation — that they’re so desperate that they will do anything to help. But he said, “We are desperate,” and he said, “Our military and our civilians” — which are often not aligned in Pakistan — “will do anything they can do to help us end this war.” This was another star aligning in the constellation.

Peace in Afghanistan

That’s an example of the top-down work that we — the USIP — have advised the Afghan and other governments. Any time you’re doing a top-down thing, there will be a lot of people working on this and the US government is officially working on it. We’re doing it unofficially. There are a lot of things that we’re doing to feed into that dialogue, into those discussions, but there’s that top-down possibility of peace in Afghanistan.

I’m almost done here, and I’m looking forward to you saying that I’m all wrong, but this is what we try to do at the Institute of Peace. We work from the bottom-up, at the grassroots, people-to-people. We, through our partners, try to resolve conflicts. In the case of our Iraqi partners, we try to provide resources, training and ideas about how those conflicts can be resolved. That’s the bottom-up work which complements the top-down work from the governments of the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan — coming up with solutions to that 17-year-old war.

There are other things that we could talk about, but I’d be glad to do that in questions and answers. Let me stop here to take your questions, your challenges, and to tell me where I’m wrong.

Peacebuilding in Proxy Wars

Audience Member: First, does the Institute for Peace have any involvement when the US is involved in a proxy war — for example, are you working at all for peace-building activities in Yemen or in Syria? Secondly, do you have a role in preventing our involvement in conflict before it occurs?

Ambassador Taylor: Two great questions. So help me keep them in my mind — prevention is the second one, and the first one is proxy wars. Yes to both.

We are doing a small amount of work, mainly at the bottom-up level in Yemen, because it’s hard to get in Yemen. We can go to places where the US Embassy can’t. We’re not the US Embassy, so we don’t have to abide by their rules. We have our own security rules and provide our own security, but we can go to places all around Afghanistan and Iraq, and a little in Syria, but we’re not in Yemen. What we’ve done there is provide some grants to Yemeni non-government organizations who are doing some of this bottom-up peace-building work, so the answer is yes, we can do some of those things.

I don’t know if it’s a proxy war, but other internal conflicts like in Libya are the same kind of thing. It’s hard to work in Libya these days. We have people there doing mostly the bottom-up, people-to-people kind of work. There are a range of smaller efforts that we have in other parts of Africa. To answer the first question, yes, we do that kind of work where we can.

Let me just say that the Institute of Peace is small — we have about 300 people in a nice building on the Mall. If you ever visit Washington, let me know and I will give you a tour. We’re a small organization, so we’re not everywhere, but we are in Yemen.

The second question was prevention. This is a really important one. Steve pointed out in the measures of positive peace, a lot of what we think of in terms of prevention is — if countries in conflict can re-establish, or in some cases establish, a compact between people and government, then conflict will be much less likely and even be prevented. Where the opposite is the case, where governments can’t govern or provide services, where there’s not a compact between the people and the government — those are “fragile states” in our terminology. That’s where we see conflict a lot, and if we can address the sources of conflict, the broken compact between the people and the governments in these fragile states, then we think we can prevent conflict.

Measuring that is really hard, because how can I demonstrate to you or to the Congress that we’ve prevented conflict? How do you say that what we did in Libya or in Tunisia prevented conflict? We can’t say that. We have a theory that we work on, but that’s the harder part. The easier part, in some sense, is this top-down work where we’re really working, or even the bottom-up that I described, where we’re sitting down with combatants and trying to resolve local conflicts, or even come up with a peace deal from the top. For those, we can come to you and say, “This is the kind of work we’re doing,” and the Congress says, “Good, keep it up.” But prevention is harder. If you have some ideas on this, we’d love to have them.

Women in Peacebuilding

Audience Member: Ambassador Taylor, I think what has always impressed me so much about the US Institute for Peace is the tremendous amount of information that I’ve received on the importance and influence, particularly on the grassroots level, on focusing on the activities of women, religion and gender. But I wonder, since this is “stories from the field,” if you could speak to this — most recently I’ve watched a lot of your live streaming in podcasts and events, and I’m thinking of Abigail Disney’s PBS series on women, war and peace-building, featuring her and the panel. So I want to commend you for that and I’m delighted that the Institute is so cognizant of the important grassroots role that women play. Could you share with the group any examples that you might have in terms of where we’re focused on gender, or what’s going on, sometimes invisibly, that women are actively doing for peace-building in those countries themselves?

Ambassador Taylor: Thank you for that, and thank you for tuning in to see the kind of work we do. We are very proud of the work that we do in this area. I think it’s fair to say that we are among the leaders in this field with a gender program — not just women, by the way, it’s gender. We have a whole office at the Institute of Peace whose web page you might have seen, and some of their work is focused on this. Kathleen Kunest leads our effort on that, and she’s up at the top level of the Institute, because the role of women in this case — which is part of gender in peace-building — is really important, and it’s been demonstrated that those peace agreements tend to last longer.

Going back to Steve’s point about positive peace, when women are involved I have two examples of stories from the field. One is in Colombia, with the long-running negotiation between the FARC and the Colombian government. One of our USIP heroes was a woman named Ginny Bouvier, who was in Colombia constantly. She wasn’t doing this by herself, but was working with Colombian women in particular, helping them organize themselves and bringing them into the discussions. As we know, the first time that the peace agreement went to the Colombian people to ratify, they turned it down because there wasn’t enough of a buy-in, there wasn’t enough of this societal agreement which Ginny had been trying to work on. It was eventually agreed by the Parliament after the first referendum, but I think we’ve had a major effect there, and so did Ginny Bouvier. She sadly died a year ago from some of the work she’d been doing in Colombia, but we are continuing that work there.

There’s another piece in Africa, where we go into villages and we work with women on countering violent extremism. The women, mothers and sisters have had a real effect on sons. It’s been mostly sons who have been attracted to this violent extremist ideology. It’s hard to measure, but we’ve had some effect there. The women in Africa, in Colombia and other places as well have had an impact. We also make it our business to be sure that any of the events that we have in Washington, any of the panels, discussions, or any other work we do overseas has women in senior, prominent positions to be able to both speak and contribute. So it’s one of the areas that we feel good about what we’re doing. Thank you for that.

Peacebuilding with the UN

Audience Member: To reduce violence, how much coordination is there between the Institute and the United Nations?

Ambassador Taylor: It’s a good question. Last week when we were in Kabul, Afghanistan, we were very eager to sit down with the UN, which has played a long-time role there. As Jeanette mentioned, I spent a year in Kabul back in the early days of this war, in 2002-2003, and the UN has played a role since then. The UN was part of the original Bonn conference in the earlier attempts to put together a government and establish a working society-government relationship, so the UN has been there for a long time and we work very closely with them. They have a big role to play. They played one in preparing for and helping to execute and monitor the elections in Afghanistan and other places. Our relations with the UN in Afghanistan is probably the closest, most intimate work that we’re doing with them, but we do it at other places as well.

We are also very close to the US government, because we have both Republicans and Democrats on our board. We are in the center of US foreign policy, and that policy has been and I hope will continue to be closely integrated with what the UN is doing. We need the UN. The United States needs the UN to do what it needs to do in Afghanistan and in many of these other conflicts that we work on, so we’re a little worried over the resignation of Nikki Haley as Ambassador. She was doing a great job, and we’ll see who replaces her. The short answer is we work closely with them.

Audience Member: Are you familiar with the research by Jones and Libecki on how terrorist groups — which identified some roughly 250 terrorist groups that existed between 1968 and 2006 — which found that the least effective approach to terrorism was a military solution, and the most effective were negotiations? Also, Chenoweth and Stephan’s inventory of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the 20th century found that non-violence was much more likely to be successful and contributed positively to democracy?

Ambassador Taylor: Thank you, two very good points. On the plane yesterday, I was making progress through Steven Pinker’s book on Enlightenment Now. In one of its chapters — and this is a very positive book by the way, if you want some reinforcement of your optimistic views about the world but also about specific things — he has a chapter on peace. He argues that in general, things are better now than they’ve ever been. He says that deaths from all kinds of causes are way down, such as accidents, combat, poverty and disease. Looking at these over a long time-frame, things are better now and are getting better — there is progress. That’s his “enlightenment pitch,” but his chapter on peace makes this point on combat deaths, and on the number of conflicts, in particular of great power conflicts. He said that we haven’t had a great power conflict since World War II. We did have the Korean War and the intervention in Iraq, which was a great power and inter-state conflict, but it’s mostly down.

Getting to your point about violent extremists, even there, over the past several years incidents are way down — not because we’re winning on the battlefield, but because we recognized that there are problems in the society that need to be addressed that makes it possible for violent extremists to do that kind of work.

Like our work on gender — I didn’t get to the male part, but we do a little in the male’s gender role in conflict — like the Institute of Peace’s work on gender, I think we are also on the cutting edge. We have a recognized, leading effort in nonviolent action. There’s a woman on our staff whose name is Maria Stephan who’s done really cutting-edge work on this, and has probably used the same sources that you have.

Audience Member: Erica Chenoweth.

Ambassador Taylor: Exactly right, they wrote a book together, and it makes exactly that point — that nonviolent opposition to dictators, oppression or corruption is much more likely to be successful than violent opposition. And she has a lot of good reasons that make a lot of sense when you think about them, but she’s on our staff and we’re very proud of her.

Measuring Stories

Audience Member: As a professor of literature, I’m particularly interested in not just the stories that we tell, but also about how audiences hear those stories. I was thinking about this idea of assessment and measuring success. Are there ways that you’re trying to measure how audiences hear these stories as either an anomaly — that it’s nice that it happened that time, but there’s no way to reproduce it — or as exemplifying the situation? I think that it’s probably important both at the grassroots level, neighbors-to-neighbors, but also at the government level.

Ambassador Taylor: I think it’s a great question. Steve, you may have thoughts about this too, and I would love to hand this over to you. The US Institute of Peace, because we are funded by the Congress, we’re funded by you. We have to think really hard about how we tell our story. We’ve found it has to be both parts of what you said — that is, we have to tell stories and anecdotes, and have to make it concrete, so that people can understand what we did. “This is what you did in Camp Spiker — 350,000 internally displaced people came back because of what you did there. I get it!” But your point’s a very good one — it can’t just be a one-off. There are millions of internally displaced people in Iraq, so we have to be able to tell a broader story and put it in a broader context. That’s where this little but powerful office that we have does this monitoring, evaluation and learning, and tries to put those anecdotes into the context of what we’ve done across the field.

It’s a lot of what Steve talked about in terms of concrete measurements, and at the outset saying, “This is what we’re going to try to do, and here’s how we’ll try to measure it: how many people came back, how much money did we spend, how many people did we train, what did those people do once they were trained?” So outcomes rather than just output. It’s that whole body of work on how to measure these things which you need to tell a bigger story, but you have to make it real for people to tell individual stories.

Audience Member: In terms of journalism, there’s a great deal of research that shows that audiences actually prefer the peace journalism approach — reporting that’s non-inflammatory, that seems to build bridges rather than exacerbate an us-versus-them notion. Seminal research in the field was done by a professor in four or five different countries — Australia, Kenya, Mexico, and a couple of others. He showed audiences several different kinds of news reporting in traditional versus peace journalism approaches. The audiences were more receptive to peace journalism because they felt like it offered solutions, they felt empowered and more knowledgeable. Research has also shown much of the same thing, that audiences prefer journalism that contains solutions. They feel empowered by them and they interact more with the content on social media. Even though in journalism schools it’s drilled into our heads to make our content sensational, perhaps in reality that’s not so true.

Ambassador Taylor: Thanks, Steve.

Justice and Peace

Audience Member: It seems that the war in Yemen is enhanced by an individual or a country that comes and just bombs, seeing kids flying up in the air. So how can we use justice to enhance peace?

Ambassador Taylor: Yemen’s a really hard case, you’re exactly right, but the general point about justice and peace I think is key. Just think about how justice figured into that one story that I told about Tikrit and Camp Spiker. The Shia tribes wanted justice. They wanted to seek revenge on the Sunni tribes that had killed 1,700 of their cadets. That was a demand for justice and revenge, and the Sunni tribes recognized the problem. They were willing to submit to the Iraqi judicial system and put those who had perpetrated that crime and others into it.

Justice is really important for peace-building, mending and resolving these disputes. Yemen is really hard. This helps me make another point: there are internal conflicts where the problems within a society or a country lead to civil war. Those are one set of intra-state conflicts. Then there are the inter-state ones, such as the Yemen issue, where you have an outside power or coalition — in this case led by Saudi Arabia, which gets to the proxy war question that you were asking about — who for whatever reason intervenes from the outside. There, the analysis and the justice components are less powerful when it’s inter-state, when it’s an outside nation committing aggression.

There are mixed versions of this too, but the justice component of peace-building is really important for civil wars like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, in order to address those causes of those conflicts. Did you have thoughts on how that works? I think that justice is a really important piece of what we’re doing.

Moderator: Thank you, Ambassador Taylor. He will be with us during this upcoming break and again at lunch, so feel free to approach him and continue the discussion. We’re going to have a 15-minute break. The coffee has been replenished. Several organizations have set up info tables downstairs. Please feel free to stop and talk with them to see if you can join their efforts, or at least be inspired by what they do. See you back here at 10:45.