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

FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE           

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Contact: Rich Robinson, deputy
director of communications

202-478-4391 or
[email protected]

WASHINGTON – 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.

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’Neil
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.

 

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