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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.

EUCOM

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Countering Hybrid Warfare: Mapping Social Contracts to Reinforce Societal Resiliency in Estonia and Beyond

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Salamah Magnuson, Morgan Keay, Kimberly Metcalf

Kremlin-backed hybrid warfare — a whole-of-society warfare on the political, economic, and social fabric of societies — has put states in the Kremlin’s crosshairs on high alert. These states remain vulnerable to hybrid threats partly because they lack appropriate tools to identify and mitigate efforts that foment political instability. Motive International developed the Social Contract Assessment Tool (SCAT) and applied a society-centric analysis in Estonia to evaluate vulnerability to or resilience against hybrid threats. Our research revealed that ethnic-Russian Estonians who speak Russian as the primary household language perceive institutions that embrace their dual identity as Estonian citizens and as ethnic Russians as legitimate and perceive institutions that challenge this dual identity as divisive. This research demonstrated the utility of the SCAT to characterize social cohesion relevant to national policy, security, and civil resistance efforts in the context of hybrid warfare.

Read on in Texas National Security Review Vol 5, Iss 2 Spring 2022

A proposal for a new Western policy on the Russia-Ukraine conflict: re-position to de-escalate

As a new threat of war looms, Western leaders need a new security policy position to induce Moscow to de-escalate. This should include specific investments in Ukraine. Indeed, peace is cheaper than war.

Providing Realistic Pre-Deployment Embassy Training for SFABs

Providing Realistic Pre-Deployment Embassy Training for SFABs

This January and February, the 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) gave Motive the opportunity to build critical understanding among their personnel when they contracted us to provide embassy role players for their validation exercise ahead of a deployment to the European theatre. By the end of the two-week event, Motive earned widespread praise from the most senior and junior members of the training audience, including an SFAB team lead about to deploy for the first time who said, “I feel as though I could walk into any embassy in the world and do my job effectively because of what I learned.”

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.

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