Project Seshat: International Negotiation and Grey Zone Conflict / Hybrid Warfare
...there is no longer any distinction between what is or is not the battlefield. Spaces in nature...are battlefields, but social spaces such as...politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields...[Warfare] can use violence, or it can be nonviolent. It can be a confrontation between professional soldiers, or one between newly emerging forces consisting primarily of ordinary people or experts.
Qiao, L. and Wang, X., Unrestricted Warfare
Beijing: People's Liberation Army Publishing House, 1999
...The goals of these hybrid efforts are to erode economic strength; undermine the legitimacy of key institutions such as governance bodies, academia, diplomatic entities and the media; encourage social discord; and weaken the bonds between the nations and international organisations...The erosion of economic strength is probably the most important element and likely the hardest to reverse once it is accomplished.
Tait, S. "Hybrid warfare: the new face of global competition."
Financial Times, October 14, 2019
"You may think to yourself: 'I'm not a national security person. I'm a scientist, a business person, an academic and so on. I'm not interested in geopolitics.' Well, I can say with a high level of confidence that geopolitics is interested in you. And it’s important that you know how you can be at risk and how you can protect your interests."
David Vigneault, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in a February 9, 2021 speech
In recent years an unfamiliar form of extreme international competition has become more evident. Different observers have devised different names for it, among which the one that comes closest to traditional negotiation studies is grey zone conflict. The most common term, however, is hybrid warfare. Some of its aspects are by now well known, such as interference in elections, and the arrival of heavily armed but unidentified "little green men" on the disputed Ukrainian border.
Less conspicuous has been a series of gambits that take place in the private sector. Many of these appear to operate by perverting what to Western parties may look like ordinary commercial negotiations. There is increasing evidence that these attacks have become widespread, and also that Western intelligence, police, military and other security agencies are not well structured to respond to such private sector actions in any strategic or coherent way. Furthermore, grey zone conflict / hybrid warfare campaigns appear to change tactics frequently, and to coordinate direct government actions with activity by private and nonprofit entities, as well as by transnational organized crime.
At the same time, the West cannot simply treat countries typically cited in this context as pure competitors, because there are also strong shared interests that require cooperation on other matters (e.g. climate change.) Negotiation experts' contemporaneous studies during the Cold War have provided a useful precedent, in their analyses of how the strongly competitive relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be, and was, kept within bounds even at the height of the tensions.
Project Seshat is a multinational effort to study and respond to this situation using a negotiation perspective. Its central focus is on dealings of all kinds between Western firms (and nonprofits) and ostensibly private entities that are or may be controlled by hostile governments. Yet the coordination of approaches and entities that is characteristic of hybrid warfare mandates paying at least some attention to the broader scope of related activity.
The ultimate object of the project is mitigation of harm; the first priority is to build up a better picture than any now available of the variety, scope and frequency of these attacks. To that end, the project has recruited approximately thirty negotiation experts (with a variety of scholarly and practical backgrounds in business, law, sociology, law enforcement and a deliberately wide array of other fields.) It is currently building out a smaller but equally experienced group of professionals with deep intelligence, military, police and other security-related expertise.
The background and initial phases of the project are outlined in the project's first publication, an article in the Fall 2020 issue of Harvard's Negotiation Journal.
Article: Hybrid Warfare, International Negotiation, and an Experiment in "Remote Convening"
Project directors:
Calvin Chrustie, Managing Partner, Interventis Global, Vancouver, Canada
Véronique Fraser, Associate Professor and Vice-Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Sherbrooke, Montréal, Canada
Chris Honeyman*, Managing Partner, Convenor Conflict Management, Washington, DC, USA
Barney Jordaan, Professor of Management Practice, Vlerick Business School, Ghent, Belgium
Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Women's Leadership, Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA
*also serves as Principal Investigator.
Less conspicuous has been a series of gambits that take place in the private sector. Many of these appear to operate by perverting what to Western parties may look like ordinary commercial negotiations. There is increasing evidence that these attacks have become widespread, and also that Western intelligence, police, military and other security agencies are not well structured to respond to such private sector actions in any strategic or coherent way. Furthermore, grey zone conflict / hybrid warfare campaigns appear to change tactics frequently, and to coordinate direct government actions with activity by private and nonprofit entities, as well as by transnational organized crime.
At the same time, the West cannot simply treat countries typically cited in this context as pure competitors, because there are also strong shared interests that require cooperation on other matters (e.g. climate change.) Negotiation experts' contemporaneous studies during the Cold War have provided a useful precedent, in their analyses of how the strongly competitive relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could be, and was, kept within bounds even at the height of the tensions.
Project Seshat is a multinational effort to study and respond to this situation using a negotiation perspective. Its central focus is on dealings of all kinds between Western firms (and nonprofits) and ostensibly private entities that are or may be controlled by hostile governments. Yet the coordination of approaches and entities that is characteristic of hybrid warfare mandates paying at least some attention to the broader scope of related activity.
The ultimate object of the project is mitigation of harm; the first priority is to build up a better picture than any now available of the variety, scope and frequency of these attacks. To that end, the project has recruited approximately thirty negotiation experts (with a variety of scholarly and practical backgrounds in business, law, sociology, law enforcement and a deliberately wide array of other fields.) It is currently building out a smaller but equally experienced group of professionals with deep intelligence, military, police and other security-related expertise.
The background and initial phases of the project are outlined in the project's first publication, an article in the Fall 2020 issue of Harvard's Negotiation Journal.
Article: Hybrid Warfare, International Negotiation, and an Experiment in "Remote Convening"
Project directors:
Calvin Chrustie, Managing Partner, Interventis Global, Vancouver, Canada
Véronique Fraser, Associate Professor and Vice-Dean, Faculty of Law, University of Sherbrooke, Montréal, Canada
Chris Honeyman*, Managing Partner, Convenor Conflict Management, Washington, DC, USA
Barney Jordaan, Professor of Management Practice, Vlerick Business School, Ghent, Belgium
Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Professor of Law and Director, Institute for Women's Leadership, Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA
*also serves as Principal Investigator.