The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2021 29 the United States. The active division was full of highly skilled technocrats for “reconstruction,” but actual missions required diplomatic and planning skill sets for “stabilization.” CSO’s first assistant secretary, Rick Barton, envisioned CSO field operations less as “expeditionary surges” of personnel and more like small, civilian “special operations” teams—not unlike his previous brainchild, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which “provides fast, flexible, short-term assistance to take advan- tage of windows of opportunity to build democracy and peace.” The big difference under Assistant Secretary Barton was that CSO’s officers were diplomats first, programmanagers second. CSO’s programs gave deployed officers venues to engage people on behalf of the United States. CSO staff designed and conducted activities alongside implementing partners and beneficiaries, while sending back political analysis to Washington. CSO’s unique approach made notable contributions to U.S. policy in Honduras, Nigeria, Kenya and Burma. Most signifi- cantly, it was the keystone of U.S. support to the Syrian opposi- tion from 2012 to 2015. But the fallout from Benghazi in 2012 squelched further department interest in potentially high-risk missions, and a new under secretary, Sarah Sewall, valued CSO’s analytic capabilities more than its field work. Since 2015, CSO’s overseas work has tended to involve indi- vidual stabilization advisers providing conflict-specific expertise to support select embassies. Recent high-impact deployments include working in Kyiv alongside conflict monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; securing defections from ISIS–West Africa in Niger; researching the dynam- ics of hybrid and nonstate armed groups in Libya, Yemen and Iraq; and increasing compliance with Colombia’s peace accord. Pioneering Analysis and Planning Early on, S/CRS embraced one of the first lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan: Stabilization requires a degree of planning far more rigorous than normally required in diplomacy—both to define policy goals clearly and to know whether they are being achieved. In addition to deployment of a cohort of stabilization advis- ers, S/CRS pioneered methods of facilitated, qualitative conflict analysis and planning designed to get all the players around a table agreed on a common understanding of, and approach to, the conflict at hand. S/CRS’ Interagency Conflict Assessment Framework chalked up successes once its use was tied to posts’ ability to receive more than $400 million in Section 1207 funding for stabilization programs from the Defense Department. Between 2008 and 2011, S/CRS’ analysis and planning capa- bility made important contributions to the Afghan counterin- surgency campaign’s design, monitoring and evaluation process with S/CRS planners deployed in Washington, Kabul and the field. Overall, the tug between planning and field work peaked and troughed throughout CSO’s history. For example, Barton deemphasized planning as a service for CSO “clients,” but inter- nalized its value for designing CSO’s operations. Assistant Secretary Barton also recognized the role data analysis could play in both anticipating conflict and evaluat- ing the effectiveness of U.S. responses. He stood up CSO’s first advanced analytics unit, which today is its own office, running the Instability Monitoring and Analysis Platform—IMAP, which any State officer can access from their desktop. IMAP puts CSO at the cutting edge of the department’s use of data analytics. Among its top priorities is adjusting the data proxies used by IMAP to better capture climate change’s impact on violence and improve its predictive capacity. Today, CSO elevates data in both planning and operations. It facilitates strategic planning and interagency coordination, often serving as a translator across the 3D community. It provides niche field interventions on targeted issues such as atrocity early warning, network analysis of hybrid and nonstate armed groups, reintegration of ex-combatants and advancement of peace pro- cesses and cease-fires. The Future of Stabilization: Foresight, Agility and Rigor Just as the international understanding of conflict preven- tion and stabilization evolved in the past 10 years, so must we continue to evolve for the next decade. Refining U.S. Conflict Analysis and Policy. In his memoir, Foreign Service , Ambassador James Dobbins vividly illustrated policymakers’ disinterest in insights from conflicts like Haiti and the Balkans when discussing Afghanistan in the critical months after 9/11, when key decisions were made that would shape the ultimate outcome of the venture. CSO’s analysis and planning Stabilization Adviser Amy Truesdell, at top, works with other international observers to track risks of violence during Kenyan elections in 2013. U.S.DEPARTMENTOFSTATE