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[00:00:00] Intro

[00:00:00] Dr Miranda Melcher: Hello and welcome to Just Access. In this podcast series, we talk to some fascinating people, including legal experts, academics, and human rights advocates from all walks of life. Through these conversations, we explore ideas about the future of human rights and improving access to justice for all. Our goal is to educate the wider public and raise awareness about human rights.

[00:00:28] After all, our motto is Everyone can be a human rights defender. My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a Senior Legal Fellow at Just Access, and usually the host of this podcast. Today, however, we have something special for you.

[00:00:46] Nalenhle Moyo: Hello, and welcome to Just Access. I’m Nalenhle Moyo, the Donor and Communications Specialist at Just Access. On this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Miranda Melcher, an Academic, Political Scientist, [00:01:00] and Legal Fellow at Just Access. Dr. Miranda recently published a book titled “Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique” where she delves into the role of access to justice and the resolution of civil conflict.

[00:01:13] Dr Miranda Melcher: In this first episode of our conversation, we’ll discuss a bit about how I got into this research and some of the big picture findings of the book before, in the next episode, talking about those specifics more and discussing implications for access to justice.

[00:01:44] Interview

Nalenhle Moyo: Dr Melcher, your voice will be instantly familiar to our listeners as the regular host of this podcast, but you’ve always been on the other side of the microphone. Listeners haven’t had the chance to find out much about you. Perhaps you can tell us about your background and how you got [00:02:00] interested in this topic of peace treaties.

[00:02:02] Dr Miranda Melcher: Thank you for asking. It is odd being on this side of the microphone, but thank you to you and the rest of the Just Access team for arranging this opportunity to talk a bit about my work beyond being the host of the podcast. This research really is something I’ve pursued throughout my academic side of things.

[00:02:21] So I became interested in the topic as an undergraduate at Yale University by accident. I knew I was interested in civil wars and the problems that they create. I think we’ll probably talk a little bit more about that later. And so I was trying to learn everything I could from people’s experiences, about places that had these sorts of conflicts, what the theory said, what the academic literature said, just trying to understand what it was that we knew and didn’t know.

[00:02:45] And encountered sort of something confusing where one of the things I was learning about, a real life conflict that actually happened, and the Lebanese Civil War, and what our theory in the literature about how to resolve conflicts, especially around military and [00:03:00] combatants, seemed to really conflict.

[00:03:02] And kind of one of them was in one class and one of them was in another class. And I went to the professors, I was, okay, I’m really confused here. I’m just an undergraduate. I’m just learning this stuff for the first time. But it seems like what happened in real life contradicts what this theory says. is meant to happen and is a good idea in real life.

[00:03:20] So, can you please help me understand what’s happening here? And they spoke amongst themselves for a bit and talked to each other and went, Oh, actually, that’s quite a good topic to investigate. So that became my undergraduate research on the Lebanese civil war. Didn’t really feel like I got to go deep enough at that level.

[00:03:35] So I was like, all right, how does one get to do more research? Oh, okay. There’s this thing called a master’s degree. Great. Let’s go do that and started looking at the Angolan civil war and peace treaties, I kept going into a PhD and now into this book, but the overriding motivation throughout is that civil wars are this thing that, they’re all over the place.

[00:03:57] There’s a lot of them. They’re nasty, [00:04:00] they’re violent, they massively disrupt all sorts of things about people’s everyday lives. All over the world, and this has been happening for quite a long time, if we even just look since the end of World War II, there’s been over a hundred civil wars, and yet that’s not what our newspapers necessarily talk about.

[00:04:16] Maybe one or two of them get in the news, but not this idea of scale. It’s not where a lot of our research is. It’s not what kind of traditional history or political science looks like. courses at university focus on. And it just seemed so strange to me that we put so much effort and energy and attention on solving massive problems that affect loads of people, like curing cancer or dealing with climate change, but not on this, not on civil wars.

[00:04:41] And instead, a lot of our research in the field of war goes to things like nuclear weapons. I’m not saying that’s not important. There’s not that many countries that have them, and we, it’s a stable list of countries, we’ve known about it for a while. So this overarching interest comes from this idea that surely given how many people it’s [00:05:00] impacting, this is something we should be paying more attention to.

[00:05:02] And then the specific interest in peace treaties came from trying to learn as much as I could, and realizing that There was something I was confused about, and there wasn’t an answer out there that completely addressed it, so I kept investigating until I guess I ended up with a book.

[00:05:17] Nalenhle Moyo: You sound very passionate about the issue, and I guess we’ll find out a bit more about the book and the work that you’ve done as we go further into the conversation.

[00:05:26] But now what I’d want to know is, how did you get involved with Just Access?

[00:05:31] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so this was actually, in some ways, very much related to the answer I just gave, because the, one of the originators of Just Access, Mark Somos, was actually one of my professors in undergraduate study. And he very kindly took pity on me my final year of undergraduate when I was so obsessed with investigating these questions that I was turning all of my term papers into further investigation on them.

[00:05:53] Not just as dissertation, but all the other papers too. And his class had nothing to do with civil wars, though, in fact, it was actually [00:06:00] incredibly helpful for finally trying to understand the US constitution and how it was developed, which despite four years in America, I didn’t get until I took his class, but he very much encouraged me to explore these interests and develop as a researcher, which I hugely appreciated.

[00:06:14] And we kept in touch sporadically and when Just Access was created, he very kindly reached out and said that he wanted to have me involved. So that’s how I got involved in the NGO. And it’s grown from there.

[00:06:26] Nalenhle Moyo: That’s interesting. Alongside your many other projects, we know you love podcasting as you are the host of this podcast and you are prolific host and a great guest, I would say, both on the Just Access podcast and all over the New Books Network. What is it about this format that makes it so special for you?

[00:06:44] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so besides being a host here, I’m also one of the more prolific hosts on the New Books Network, which is a great initiative to make Mostly academic research more available to the world.

[00:06:54] So doing in depth interviews with authors to get their ideas out there. In depth [00:07:00] interviews that don’t have the same access barriers that the books themselves might have, whether due to pricing or inaccessibility in bookshops, etc. And so yeah, I guess I suppose I do love podcasting. In a lot of ways for me it started off as being a fan of podcasts, as being a listener.

[00:07:14] Especially during my PhD, I got to a point where despite a lifelong love of reading, I just couldn’t read anymore. There was so much to read already for my research, and the idea of reading for fun just, I couldn’t quite get myself to do it in those last few years particularly. But there’s still so many things that are interesting in the world that I don’t know about that I wanted to learn about.

[00:07:34] And so I found podcasts as a great way to still tickle that part of my brain that was curious and wanted to learn, but couldn’t quite do it through books for a while. So I started listening to a lot of podcasts, including the New Books Network podcast. And so then it was after my PhD when I was done with that piece and had a more sort of normal nine to five job, that That I was, how do I keep doing that and realize that I could try out being a host [00:08:00] and it turns out I really like it.

[00:08:02] And people keep saying that they’re willing to come and talk to me. I just feel incredibly lucky that I get to keep having fabulous conversations with fascinating people.

[00:08:09] Nalenhle Moyo: Right. That’s great work! We’re going to focus today on your book, which is titled Securing Peace. But before we turn to that, this actually isn’t your first book.

[00:08:18] It’s your second. The first book is a book you co wrote with Jessica Breutman, Amy Margulis, and John Davis, and it’s part of One of Your Other Passions, Inclusive Teaching. Can you tell me more about that?

[00:08:32] Dr Miranda Melcher: Sure. So this project came out of many years of collaboration, especially with Jessica Breutman, who herself had been collaborating with Amy and John together.

[00:08:40] So we all brought our things together. And in a lot of ways, this came, this was work we had started before the pandemic, but then brought it together during the pandemic. to realize that we have a lot of students in all sorts of education, primary school, secondary school, higher education, who don’t necessarily fit the kind of assumed mold that a lot of educational structures have been [00:09:00] designed around.

[00:09:01] Now, we know that’s true in terms of the design mold, having specific expectations in terms of gender or race, but one that the four of us were working on independently anyway is the idea of Neurodiversity of people having lots of different kinds of brains, but school often being designed for one of them to the expense perhaps of others.

[00:09:20] And so the group of us together had each been working on different aspects of helping neurodiverse people really be able to do more in the world generally. My particular focus was the educational side of things. And so we brought all the pieces together and wrote a book together. And yeah, as I said, my part was the education bit.

[00:09:37] So the others have. fabulous expertise that I won’t even pretend I can speak properly to. But my focus is how can we make education more inclusive? And so the book was part of that, and I also do some other bits and pieces around inclusive teaching still to this day, so it remains something I’m quite passionate about.

[00:09:56] Nalenhle Moyo: That’s really interesting. I think now we can turn to your new book. [00:10:00] It’s your first solely authored book, and it was published by Bloomsbury in March, and that’s about how many months ago? We are in May now, so it’s just about two months old. It’s called Securing Peace in Angola and Mozambique, The Importance of Specificity in Peace Treaties.

[00:10:18] We’ll put a link in the show notes for the listeners to find the book if they wish to read it. It’s a really fascinating and engaging read and you focus in the book on what are the factors which make a peace treaty successful in bringing an end to a civil war. One of the most surprising insights from the book for someone new in the field might be that it’s quite unusual for civil wars to be won.

[00:10:39] Rather, there’s a decision to end them, usually through negotiating. Why is that? Why are the civil wars so hard to win?

[00:10:48] Dr Miranda Melcher: So this is a good place to start, though I will say that this is very much me building on the work of many other scholars who focus on this aspect in particular. But in brief, the idea is that wars [00:11:00] can be won by one side winning on the battlefield.

[00:11:02] That is a thing that can happen. The shorthand we use is battlefield victory quite often and that can happen in all sorts of different kinds of wars, including civil wars. But it actually doesn’t happen that often. More often, wars end through negotiated settlement. Again, both civil wars and other kinds of wars.

[00:11:19] This can be for a number of reasons. This can be, for example, if The various parties to a civil war have external backing, and so they continue to get supplies and funding and weapons from people who are outside of the conflict, and therefore it’s quite hard for one side to cut off that access to the other, and that means that fighting can just keep going.

[00:11:39] This can also be for reasons of geography, reasons of political economy. There can be a lot of reasons why fighting gets to a point where it keeps going. There’s enough money and organization and weapons and people willing to physically fight that the conflict continues but neither side quite has enough of an edge to actually beat the other.

[00:11:59] [00:12:00] And that gets even more complicated if we’re dealing with a conflict that has more than two sides. And so quite often you get to a point where One party or another, actually in the conflict or external but supporting the conflict, it can happen a bunch of different ways, thinks about, hang on a second, if the whole reason we’re fighting in the first place is to achieve some sort of political goal, maybe it’s worth trying to negotiate a way to achieve something like that because trying to achieve it by dominating on the battlefield isn’t working.

[00:12:31] Now we can sometimes call this stalemate or herding stalemate but more often than not. We get to a point where that’s what at least some parties want to try and do rather than try and win on the battlefield, especially in the kind of world we’re in now where it’s pretty, there’s a lot more ways to acquire weaponry, there’s a lot more ways to acquire financing than there were perhaps a few hundred years ago.

[00:12:56] it means that it is often, you can keep fighting for a really long time and it’s not [00:13:00] really getting you anywhere, so you might be willing to try other things, but simply having one side being open to a negotiation is very different to actually getting all the way to a signed and then implemented peace treaty, but that’s a long process that I’m interested in investigating, because that is in fact how the majority of civil wars end these days. That’s been true for at least the last three or four decades and probably isn’t going to change. So if we’re really talking about how to end civil wars, then this is the type of ending we need to investigate.

[00:13:30] Nalenhle Moyo: And when we talk about civil wars, what’s at stake? Why does it matter? And what is the human cost of getting these models wrong?

[00:13:39] Dr Miranda Melcher: This goes back to what I was saying at the beginning in terms of just actual human impact, right? When we’re talking about civil wars, particularly the ones that I studied, Angola and Mozambique, and we’ll get to this more in a moment, but this is, they’re not outliers unfortunately in this sense. To give you a sense of scale in terms of time, the Angolan civil war lasted from 1975 to 2003.

[00:13:58] That’s a really long time. [00:14:00] Right? Mozambique’s war was shorter, but still from 1975 1977 ish to 1992. That’s still a really long time. Civil wars, on average, if we’re looking in the sort of post World War II modern period, we are looking at least five years, if not quite a lot longer. We’re looking at average time that people spend in official refugee camps being close to 20 years at this point.

[00:14:24] The human need to resolve these things and figure out better methods of doing it is really quite high, and the human cost of getting it wrong is quite simply the putting in a lot of effort to try and get from one party being open to negotiation all the way through a negotiation process to a nice pretty photo op to sign the document of the peace treaty to trying to put it into practice.

[00:14:45] That takes minimum really about 10 years and if the things, or at least my argument is, if the things that are talked about in those negotiations, if the things that are written down in that nice treaty that has the shiny photo op, if those things don’t actually [00:15:00] resolve. The issues that people are fighting over in a reasonable way, then it’s not going to work.

[00:15:06] And a nice shiny photo op is going to be the end of the piece rather than the beginning. Because it’s one thing to agree to do something, but if you’ve agreed to do things that actually are not in anyone’s interests or are not in key people’s interests, they’re not going to actually do it. And so we’ve spent all this time and energy trying to end this war that’s impacting loads of people well beyond the negotiation process who may or may not have any ability to influence it, and the human cost of getting it wrong is that the whole thing keeps going.

[00:15:35] And so to me, In going into that black box of what actually gets talked about in negotiations, what difference does it make what’s talked about in negotiations, what’s actually on those pieces of paper, and why does it matter? That seems like a black box that we can’t safely just say, oh, I don’t know, the amorphous experts somewhere know about that.

[00:15:55] It turns out there isn’t some panel of amorphous experts who know exactly how to do [00:16:00] these things. It’s much more ad hoc than we might think. And I just think that’s, you know, Honestly, too risky, given that most people in the world, I think, very confidently want to get on with their everyday lives in an environment of much more peace and physical safety than living in the middle of a war zone allows.

[00:16:16] Nalenhle Moyo: Okay, so that now that brings me to the next question. We know that there are different approaches to civil war peace treaties, and in your book you focus very strongly on security and no one key question, who gets. the military. Give us a background on this. Why is this such a crucial question?

[00:16:37] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so this is a very good question and a very fair question, because peace treaties actually are massive.

[00:16:43] So a kind of, I would say an average length modern peace treaty is going to run at least 70 pages. There are a lot of different sections within a peace treaty, and I think that’s probably a good thing. I’m not saying that’s the problem, but I do think it’s relatively acceptable to say that there are certain sections of [00:17:00] the peace treaty that kind of are more make it or break it than others.

[00:17:04] So there’s loads of things that have to be solved to end a conflict, there are loads of things that have to be rebuilt, but some of them are more immediate than others. So for example, No offense to any economists who might be listening, but decisions about how to redesign the central bank maybe aren’t as immediately important as which day is the ceasefire going to start, right?

[00:17:25] So, again, looking at all these different sections, There was also a practical element of these are huge documents with a lot going on. If I’m going to try and figure out how they were negotiated and what impact that made, unclear if you can look at the whole, a whole of this document in that level of detail and then do comparative work as well.

[00:17:43] So I thought about it from a kind of very everyday human sort of level. If you’re trying to say we’re going to end this conflict by signing this piece of paper, which things are going to matter most immediately. things like ceasefires and which things are going to have the highest [00:18:00] likelihood of if they go right or wrong, they’ll make the difference for the whole thing on rambling.

[00:18:05] So again, if say, I know I’m using economists as an example, but that’s mostly because it’s a very straightforward one. I don’t actually dislike economists. If say, for example, there are disagreements over how to reorganize the central bank, that’s not a, you know, Culture, that’s not a group of experts, that’s not a normative situation where that kind of disagreement spills off into people with guns shooting each other on the street.

[00:18:27] That doesn’t usually happen, right? Central bankers, it turns out, have meetings all over the world all the time and we don’t hear about violence erupting from them. On the other hand, if the people with the weapons who have just been fighting the conflict, aka are already skilled enough to fight, are already willing to fight, if they’re not satisfied with the terms of the treaty.

[00:18:49] There’s a much shorter line from them being dissatisfied to them enabling more violence to continue than for other key groups involved. And so to me, the kind of most [00:19:00] immediate priority is making sure that the people with the weapons and the skills and the desire to use them are happy with what the treaty negotiation process has done and what’s been agreed in that bit of paper.

[00:19:11] Other things become important later on, and I think are important at the same time in some cases, but if you can’t figure that one out, In some ways, it doesn’t matter what the other 60 odd pages are. And so that’s where I decided to focus.

[00:19:25] Nalenhle Moyo: All right, that’s really interesting. So now I want to talk a little bit about elections.

[00:19:30] Most negotiated treaties that you discuss seem to have put the emphasis somewhere else on elections. And this is also where much of the existing literature focuses. Why is that, and why is it not the end all be all, it’s perceived as.

[00:19:46] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so this is a good question. Essentially, this is the idea that if we’ve got, say, a 70 page peace treaty, there might be 10 pages on security, which is where I focus, but there might also be 10 pages on elections, which is, as you said, where a lot of the literature focuses on.

[00:19:59] [00:20:00] I think that this is perhaps not necessarily misguided, but we do need to spend more time on the security than we do for a few reasons. First of all, a lot of the reason we have that focus in the first place is because a lot of this research started in the 1990s, coming out of the Cold War, and there was very much the atmosphere of democracy winning, that democracy will solve all these problems.

[00:20:21] I think we have a more nuanced view of that now. I think we also have a more nuanced view of the idea that saying for a country that has never had elections before, great, the solution to this multi decade long conflict is suddenly to have free and fair elections. We no longer are quite so naive, I think, to believe it’s a silver bullet in a way that And I think that from the interviews and archival work that I did, it was clear that was, in fact, some of the thinking that went into this sort of thing in the 90s.

[00:20:47] And I also think that, again, it goes back to this idea of what’s the shortest line between signing a treaty and something going wrong, such that violence erupts again. And I do think that. [00:21:00] It’s less about making sure that individual elites who want to be president or vice president get the shiny title that they want.

[00:21:07] I do think that’s some of it, and I do definitely talk about that in the book. But I think if we’re just focusing at that level, and not about the 22 year old boy who’s been fighting since he was 16, and what he’s going to get out of this peace process, I think then we’re, again, falling into this trap of not focusing on the immediate goal of ending conflict.

[00:21:30] Nalenhle Moyo: So you mentioned something on security issues, now I’m wondering why have security issues, especially the creation of an integrated military force, been underprioritized?

[00:21:41] Dr Miranda Melcher: Yeah, so within security issues more generally, I focus on a particular kind of type of solving security problems called military integration.

[00:21:50] So this idea is offering kind of all combatants, so even whether you’re on the government side or the rebel side, or depending on the conflict, however many sides there might be, offering all the [00:22:00] combatants through a peace process the option to either give up your weapons and go home to a civilian life, or home in this case we’re using as just shorthand to civilian life, it may not actually be where you are from, fair enough and having a job that has nothing to do with fighting.

[00:22:12] Or, having the option to join a newly created, integrated military. So, obviously the problem with a civil war is you’ve got at least two militaries running around fighting each other, which is not super sustainable. So, creating a new military, and people who want to join that one can go into it, regardless of what group they were fighting with before.

[00:22:29] So, that’s what an integrated military force can look like. But that’s not what we usually research. We usually research the thing called DDR. It stands for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. And realistically, it’s exactly what it sounds like, right? Disarmament, give up your weapons. Demobilize, go back to somewhere civilian.

[00:22:47] And reintegrate into civilian society. So get a job that has nothing to do with the military. Now that might sound like, Oh, isn’t that what you were just saying? The key with DDR is that it’s not usually given as an option to all [00:23:00] sides equally. It’s usually given to whoever either loses on the battlefield, as I said that doesn’t actually happen that often, so it’s usually given in the negotiated settlement to the rebels.

[00:23:12] Usually. Or whichever side comes out with less political weight, but that is often also the rebels. So I’m using a few generalizations here, but that roughly is what we’re talking about. And the reason that I’m skeptical of this is, first off, we’ve got loads of examples of where this has happened. So, We’ve got loads of evaluation, we’ve got loads of research, we’ve got loads of reports, which is incredibly helpful for a researcher like me.

[00:23:36] And DDR doesn’t work that well. People don’t give up the weapons that they’re supposed to give up. They might go back to civilian life, but if they’ve been, for example, promised training or repayment to learn a new set of skills, have a new job, Quite often the funding doesn’t materialize, they don’t get those payments, they don’t get that training, or they do, but it takes three or four years to get there, at [00:24:00] best.

[00:24:00] And so the sorts of jobs that they get sent to are things like building roads, or digging ditches. And coming from a place where you’re a combatant in a military, where there’s an organization that you report to, where you have a personal weapon and a sense of physical security, where you have status, especially in a place where conflict is happening.

[00:24:19] The people who can physically protect themselves often have quite high status. You’re now giving all that up to go build a road, but you didn’t lose. It was a negotiated settlement. The other guys didn’t actually beat you. Why are you having to go through this, but they’re not? They get to keep their uniform, maybe even get a nicer one, keep their weapon, keep the status, keep the job that they already have all the skills for, and you can’t.

[00:24:44] There’s a lot of reasons, I think, that DDR can go wrong. A lack of funding, for one thing, is an issue. But there’s, at the heart of it, to me, this conceptual problem around implementing DDR for one side of a conflict when it is ending through negotiation rather than victory. [00:25:00] And so what I was curious about was military integration, because in doing this research early on, this is what I meant earlier when I was talking about being confused, I found examples in real life where this had been done, and it seemed to work.

[00:25:16] Different definitions of success, and we can talk about that if you want, but at least in terms of immediate conflict cessation, it achieved that. And yet that wasn’t what the theory talked about. That wasn’t what the literature talked about. That wasn’t what big policy actors like the United Nations were going around and recommending.

[00:25:33] And this discrepancy between the recommendation is for this thing that doesn’t work that well, and this thing that is happening and might work is getting almost no attention. At least we should go investigate because maybe this is another option. So that was very much to me the motivation for investigating military integration specifically to honestly find out a lot more about what it was to see if maybe it could be a more viable possibility.

[00:25:57] Nalenhle Moyo: Now that you’ve spoken about the military, I’m [00:26:00] curious to know who gets the military. It does seem like a very simple question, but if you imagine there’s a group A and group B, they’re in conflict for a country and then they agree on a treaty. Why isn’t the simple answer a 50 50?

[00:26:14] Dr Miranda Melcher: So it can be. Essentially the answer is here is this is where the negotiation bit happens and this is something that I found really interesting in doing the kind of case specific research is like exactly this question, right? If there’s an agreement for an integrated military, okay great, but then what? Right? What does that military look like?

[00:26:34] And how do those negotiations take place? And what I found is that it comes down to decisions about who has the most, who has what number of fighters. So for example, in Mozambique, the two sides didn’t have a 50 50 split of combatants. One side just had a lot more fighters than the other. And so if they had both been given 50 50 slots into the new integrated military, there would One side would have [00:27:00] had to send a whole bunch of people away, and the other side would have barely been able to fill the slots.

[00:27:04] In fact, those negotiations started talking about 50 50. And as they got further into the details, They realized, ooh, actually that’s not going to quite work in our case. And so we’re able to negotiate to something that literally just made more practical sense. And this comes down to a lot of things around, for example, individual soldiers decision making.

[00:27:25] Do you want to join the integrated military or go home? Knowing who wants to do what is going to help us understand things like these kinds of numbers. But it also, in poking at this more specifically, gave me a lot of insight into kind of, What’s important to different actors when building an integrated military?

[00:27:43] For example, on the high political side of things, this idea of the overall ratio really mattered a lot, right? It was a point of pride. It was about saying how strong you were. It was about having leverage on the political parts of the negotiations. Hey, you better do what we want because look how many people we’ve [00:28:00] got in the military.

[00:28:01] But on the military side of things, when you actually ask the military leaders of the conflict, or even the sort of more mid level officers, It actually, they cared a lot less about the overall ratio, and they cared a lot more about the places available at different rank levels. For example, people who were used to be calling General across the course of the conflict, really wanted to make sure that they were still called General in an integrated military, even if they hadn’t been, for example, through the official sort of training that otherwise would be required.

[00:28:30] That mattered to them a lot more than overall, is it 50 50 or 60 40 or 70 30. And so that was, I think, a really key aspect of this, that when we talk about negotiations and integrated militaries, we can’t just rely on the diplomats or the politicians perspective. We also need to be bringing the military actors themselves into the negotiations.

[00:28:58] Outro

[00:28:58] Dr Miranda Melcher: It has been such a pleasure to share with [00:29:00] you some of the work I’ve been doing over the last few years, but don’t worry, I’ll be back as host as usual for the future episodes. If you’re enjoying the Just Access podcast, please tell your friends, like us and share us on social media, and please rate us and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app.

[00:29:15] We love to hear what you think, and we really do read every single review. It helps us get the word out about the podcast and know what you’re liking about the show. You can also get in touch with us more directly with your comments, reflections, or suggestions for people or topics we should cover by contacting us at podcast at just-access.de, that’s podcast at just-access.de. Until next time!