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Impact Initiatives, Thought Leadership
Salamah Magnuson, Morgan Keay & Kimberly Metcalf
Countering Hybrid Warfare: Mapping Social ...
Training & Education
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, Thought Leadership, Training & Education
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, Training & Education
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.

AFRICOM

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The Power of Civ-Mil Partnerships in Fragile State Development: A CSIS Panel Discussion Featuring Motive CEO Morgan Keay

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The Power of Civ-Mil Partnerships in Fragile State Development: A CSIS Panel Discussion Featuring Motive CEO Morgan Keay

In May 2017, Motive CEO Morgan Keay was a featured panelist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at an event entitled “The Role of Multi-Sector Partnerships in the New Development Era.” CSIS hosted this half-day event at the start of the Trump Administration when U.S. foreign assistance budgets faced significant cuts. The panel Morgan spoke on was asked to explore creative options to better leverage capital – financial or otherwise – through cross-sector partnerships, specifically in conflict-affected and fragile states. 

Opening her remarks with the statement, “Conflict affects all sectors of society and therefore takes all sectors of society to address." Morgan confronted an idea considered to be heretical by many in the international development and diplomacy communities: expanded partnerships with the military can advance development and humanitarian goals. To make the case, Morgan offered a story about a real-world case study: a World Bank-funded road construction project through the heart of extremist-affected territory in West Africa’s Lake Chad Basin. This example illustrates what happened when local civil society, the host country’s military, and the U.S. military came together around a violence-plagued infrastructure project to transform human security in the region.

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

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

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.

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.

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