what we do.

EVERY NATION ON EARTH faces a grave and immediate crisis in strategic affairs: how to reform national security strategy to address an increasingly complex array of transnational security concerns. Studies in the new networked landscape of globalization are all but new; academic processions on the matter have grown tired and increasingly self-evident. Yet threats of international terrorism, pandemic disease, and the security implications of global climate change are very real. No longer is the so-called ‘irregular’ threat an aberration and no nation can afford to treat it as such. Focusing instead on state-centric security or more nebulous notions of human security, few institutions have dedicated themselves to forming concrete, practical recommendations directed at assisting any government or organization worldwide in the adaptation of core national strategy. Policymakers in every nation require clear, unbiased assessments of the threat and coherent, practical recommendations for their alleviation. This is not an academic exercise. To be proactive in their defence, nations must acquire their own particular comprehensive strategic visions which define the threat and provide overarching guidance for its alleviation. Leveraging the research of networked scholars around the world, the Transnational Crisis Project seeks to advance an entirely new genre of core strategic thought: transnational security strategy.

Concentration of Associated Scholars centre on six key competencies:

⊕ International Non-State Terrorism & Insurgency

⊕ Infectious Disease

⊕ Climate Change & Security

⊕ Population-Centric Foreign Affairs

⊕ Transnational Criminal Enterprise

⊕ Modeling, Simulation, Wargaming & Analysis

As the Crisis Project provides recommendations for governments and organizations around the world, the content of its work is necessarily transnational in nature. But so too is its structure. Rather than adopting the traditional bureaucratic model, the Transnational Crisis Project operates within a more modern, lean, flexible network of Associated Scholars globally. For any particular report, a cell leader with familiarity or geographic proximity to the particular government or institution for which a report is designed, draws from a pool of Associated Scholars those most interested and best suited for the research to assist in the report. A report on neutralizing al-Qa’eda in the Maghreb therefore may include scholars in Algeria, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, directed by the London cell leader, and may even include separate sets of recommendations per government of interest. The result is a modern, transnational network designed to address modern, transnational threats.

Benefits of a flexible, transnational design extend beyond providing third sector analysis to developing nations for whom such infrastructure simply does not exist. But so too do those nations with well-developed think tanks benefit by identifying global synergies and new perspectives generally unavailable to traditional bureaucracy. After all, what other organization can say they link a tribal leader in the Pakistani frontier to a network analyst at Oxford for delivery to a policymaker in Madrid? Cosmopolitanism at its best.