Impact Initiatives, Thought Leadership
Salamah Magnuson, Morgan Keay & Kimberly Metcalf
Countering Hybrid Warfare: Mapping Social ...
Countering Hybrid Warfare: Mapping Social Contracts to Reinforce Societal Resiliency in Estonia and Beyond
Signature Courses
Motive International
Motive Leads in Virtual Training & ...

Responding rapidly to DoD's need for remote training to maintain force readiness, our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and tech innovators adapted Motive’s signature courses to a fully virtual format. Since April, we’ve executed multiple iterations of highly-interactive online courses to soldiers and Marines working from home, quarantined on deployment, or constrained to virtual battle assemblies and drills. Find out more and see if these courses are right for your mission!

Motive Leads in Virtual Training & Education in the COVID-19 Era
Impact Initiatives, Signature Courses, Thought Leadership
Motive International
A Pathway to Systemic Stability: ...

The current mass exodus of Venezuelans fleeing violence, economic collapse, and political instability in their home country is the largest migratory movement in Latin American history. Desperate to identify more effective and holistic policy and programmatic options to address the Venezuelan Migrant crisis, stakeholders in the region have expressed a need for a systems-level analysis to inform better strategies. This need inspired our team to conduct desk-based and in-country research relying on the rigorous and participatory Transforming Crisis Systems (TCS) approach.

A Pathway to Systemic Stability: Applying Motive’s Transforming Crisis Systems (TCS) to Colombia’s Venezuelan Migrant Crisis 
Thought Leadership, Signature Courses
Morgan Keay
Dismantling Afghanistan's Opium Empire: How the ...

Since the toppling of their regime in 2001, the Taliban have demanded recognition from Kabul as a legitimate political actor in a country where they enjoy substantial support among segments of the population, not least for for the economic and infrastructural systems they helped cultivate and on which nearly all rural Afghans depend. The Taliban have a near monopoly on a global commodity representing a $4 billion dollar a year industry that necessitates the sustainment of elaborate supply chains: opium. But a deeper conflict analysis foretells a future in which the Taliban could soon be incentivized not only to walk away from its lucrative drug empire but become an ardent counter-narcotics partner to the Kabul government and its international backers.

Dismantling Afghanistan's Opium Empire: How the heroin-rich Taliban could become the world's most ironic counter-narcotics champion
Thought Leadership
Morgan Keay
Shaping Authority in the Human Domain: ...

The term ‘governance’ recently re-emerged across the Civil Affairs Regiment, appearing on new Mission Essential Task Lists in the SOF component, in updated regiment-wide doctrine and publications and as a reinvigorated topic of concept and capability development.01 Governance is not new to CA. The regiment’s roots are in Military Government in post-World War I and World War II theatres, and more recently in state-building endeavors, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, images of CA forces executing technocratic, essential service projects in support of governments-in-transition is often the first image that comes to mind when one thinks of governance in the military context. This image is problematic.

Shaping Authority in the Human Domain: Transforming Civil Affairs’ Aperture on Governance.

Countering Violent Extremism

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Dismantling Afghanistan's Opium Empire: How the heroin-rich Taliban could become the world's most ironic counter-narcotics champion

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Dismantling Afghanistan's Opium Empire: How the heroin-rich Taliban could become the world's most ironic counter-narcotics champion

Since the toppling of their regime in 2001, the Taliban have demanded recognition from Kabul as a legitimate political actor in a country where they enjoy substantial support among segments of the population, not least for for the economic and infrastructural systems they helped cultivate and on which nearly all rural Afghans depend. The Taliban have a near monopoly on a global commodity representing a $4 billion dollar a year industry that necessitates the sustainment of elaborate supply chains: opium. But a deeper conflict analysis foretells a future in which the Taliban could soon be incentivized not only to walk away from its lucrative drug empire but become an ardent counter-narcotics partner to the Kabul government and its international backers.

From Precedent, Possibility: New Models for "Whole of Society" Foreign Policy

From Precedent, Possibility: New Models for "Whole of Society" Foreign Policy

Fragile and conflict-affected regions of the world threaten not only U.S. national security, but the stability and prosperity of markets and society. If we accept that governments, businesses, and citizens all stand to gain by addressing global crises, then a “whole-of-society” approach to U.S. foreign policy should be the norm. Yet in practice, full-spectrum, civil-military (civ-mil), public-private collaboration remains ad hoc and sub-optimized. This is especially true for U.S. engagements in the world’s trickiest places, namely fragile and conflict-affected regions. With the Trump Administration still forming its global strategies and re-shaping how resources and roles are arranged for U.S. foreign policy, comes an opportunity to re-imagine how stakeholders collaborate in countries facing crises. In light of proposed foreign assistance cuts, an expanding defense budget, and a more commercially-inclined Administration, civilian, military, public, and private actors may in fact have no choice but to leverage their comparative advantages like never before.

Friends, not Enemies of the State: Civil Society in Extremist-Affected Nations

“Improving government legitimacy is vital to a just and peaceful Iraq,” Mercy Corps posits in their newly-released “Investing in Iraq’s Peace: How Good Governance Can Diminish Support for Violent Extremism.” The title and the research behind it unsurprisingly affirm what has come to be the prevailing hypothesis in the global Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) discourse: poor governance resulting in marginalization, whether real or perceived, is a key driver of extremism; More so than poverty, religion or ethnicity. Indeed, data collected everywhere from Iraq to Nigeria, Colombia to Afghanistan support this notion. And yet improving governance remains an under-pursued and scarcely funded CVE strategy. Perhaps because improving governance, for many, seems an abstract and onerous objective; and one that extremist-affected states often resist. 

This report, however, suggests an indirect approach to improving governance may be a paradoxically straightforward way of targeting extremism: Invest in civil society, and governance will improve, followed, in turn, by a reduction in extremism.

Most of us quietly root for the grassroots NGOs who are demanding improved transparency in weak states, or for watchdog groups exposing state corruption and human rights abuses in an effort to spark reform. But it comes as no surprise that the governance institutions these civil society actors have in their sights, hardly jump at the chance to invest in or empower them. This report suggests, however, maybe they should be.

Mercy Corps' research in Iraq suggests that as the prominence of civil society groups rise, (For example, those who serve as honest brokers between marginalized groups and government bodies) so too do public perceptions of governance. This demonstrates the correlation between civil society and governance. If, by extension, improvements in governance are correlated with drops in extremist sentiment -- as has been documented in contexts around the globe -- it follows that the strengthening civil society may be an indirect way to counter violent extremism. 

In Nigeria, a state signaling its earnest desire to counter the extremism promulgated by Boko Haram, the government (and donors and businesses and others) may consider enabling and investing in civil society as an important element in CVE campaigns. In Mali, where a strategy entitled “Civil Society for Human Security” was penned by a consortium of local NGOs, the national government (who has already been the target of AQIM and ethnic extremists), may be well-served listening to and integrating critique offered them by their domestic civil society. In fact, across the globe, naturally defensive officials may find that embracing their critics helps them defeat a far more insidious foe.       

The idea that “boosting civil society reduces extremism” remains a vague hypothesis, but Mercy Corps' new research on Iraq, coupled with data from extremist contexts around the world, offer empirical evidence to suggest there is indeed a link. States from the Sahel to the Levant to Latin America to Southeast Asia that each face their own brands of extremism may wish to consider making nice with even the peskiest of NGOs, advocacy groups, or watchdogs. Doing so may spare those governments from a far worse enemy of the state.

Are you motivated to spark change?