Stimson Center Initiative Expands to Seek Solutions To Wider Range of International Security Threats

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Managing Across Boundaries Initiative at the Stimson Center is expanding to seek practical solutions to a broader range of security threats confronting nations and businesses around the world, Stimson President and CEO Ellen Laipson announced today.

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The initiative, originally focused on nuclear nonproliferation, has widened its scope and added staff to study additional threats, Laipson said. These include the smuggling across international borders of arms, weapons of mass destruction, illegal narcotics, people, laundered money, counterfeit goods and intellectual property.

"We're working with the private sector and nongovernmental organizations as well as governments to find innovative ways to protect them from international criminals and terrorists who have no respect for national borders," Laipson said. "Outlaws are using evolving technologies and increasingly creative schemes to enrich themselves and victimize societies, so it makes sense for the targets of these attacks to work together to defend themselves."

Managing Across Boundaries amalgamates several programs:

• Working with developing countries in the Global South to address threats to security that impinge upon economic growth and development.
• Working with private industry to simultaneously reduce transnational security threats while enhancing market opportunities.
• Reducing the unregulated trade in conventional arms that can provide weapons to terrorists and criminals, while ensuring the legitimate arms trade is not impeded.
• Seeking coordinated global action involving national and local governments, industry and donors to promote health programs and save lives.
• Reducing the sale of counterfeit goods – which now account for 5 to 7 percent of world trade, according to the International Chamber of Commerce – by working with governments and the private sector.

Each of these threats poses immediate security challenges and long-term development threats.

The Managing Across Boundaries Initiative is headed by Managing Director Brian Finlay. The deputy director of the program is Johan Berganas. Rachel Stohl is a senior associate and Nathaniel Olson is a research associate. Senior advisors are Debra Decker and Allen Moore. In addition, Ochieng Adala and O'Neal Hamilton are visiting fellows for the program.

"Our work is focusing on a wide variety of transnational security threats and development challenges that are complex and inseparable," Finlay said. "We're exploring innovative and pragmatic policy recommendations that spring from the space in between established paradigms and by engaging public and private sector stakeholders in innovative relationships."

"Managing Across Boundaries is working to better pool government and private resources made necessary by current economic realities," Finlay added.

Managing Across Boundaries is an outgrowth of the Beyond Boundaries Initiative at Stimson, which was recently the subject of a laudatory report by the Carnegie Foundation. The foundation said Beyond Boundaries, which is now sustainably funded by governments, is "an initiative to build an effective model for sustainable nonproliferation of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The project represented an exciting and innovative way of thinking about security."

A few of the problems the Managing Across Boundaries Initiative is designed to deal with are illustrated by these statistics:

• One quarter of the annual $4 billion small arms trade around the world is unauthorized or illicit.
• According to the U.S. government, approximately 800,000 incidents of international human trafficking occur every year. This figure does not include the millions of other people who are trafficked within their own countries.
• According to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, the global illegal drug trade is worth an estimated $322 billion annually, with 52,356 metric tons of opium, cannabis, cocaine and amphetamine-type stimulants produced each year.

The Stimson Center is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that conducts research and offers pragmatic policy ideas on some of the most important peace and security challenges around the world. Stimson was recently honored with a $1 million MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

SOURCE Stimson Center