KYRGYZSTAN

In June 2010, violence raged in Southern Kyrgyzstan’s Fergana Valley when ethnic Kyrgyz targeted

ethnic Uzbeks in a spate of killings and destructions of homes. Nearly 500 were killed and thousands

of houses, entire neighbourhoods, were reduced to rubble in days.

One of our team was attached at the time to Freedom House, a human rights and democracy

watchdog organization headquartered in Washington, DC. The U.S. Department of States contracted

Freedom House to design and implement a communications program to promote inter-ethnic

healing in Kyrgyzstan in the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for that fall.

Using quantitative and qualitative research methods, our team member fielded polls and deployed

to Osh and Jalalabad to conduct focus groups probing attitudes about the violence and a possible

way forward. Based on the results of these, he designed a public awareness campaign that

encouraged political actors to embrace themes of peace, justice and inter-ethnic accord. These

included television PSAs shot on location and a social media campaign.

That autumn’s election led to a coalition government that pledged to continue investigating the

causes of the violence and guard against its re-occurrence. While the Fergana Valley has occasionally

been fraught with tension, fortunately violence at the level seen in June 2010 has not recurred.

MOROCCO

By 2018, after eight years in power, the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) coalition

dominated a Moroccan political landscape in a state of institutional crisis. With a stagnant economy,

rampant corruption, widening social inequality and systemic challenges afflicting health,

employment and education, the country was in the throes of increasingly violent street protests,

challenging the King’s authority with calls for reform.

Leading industrialist and government minister, Aziz Akhannouch, set his sights on disrupting the

political order, unseating the PJD and creating a modern secular economy in its place. Taking the

helm of a small, elitist opposition party (National Rally for Independents, RNI) with less than 10%

approval rating, Akhannouch approached members of our team with a single challenge: to win the

next parliamentary elections in 2021.

We embarked on an extensive behavioural research programme to map the Moroccan electorate

and its underlying narratives and motivational drivers, developed a new brand positioning, message

architecture and manifesto for the candidate and party, and took it to the Moroccan people and

diaspora through multiple channels – speeches and interviews, media and social media engagement,

rallies and neighbourhood events. A key initiative was the “100 Cities, 100 Days” initiative in which

RNI officials and supporters travelled to 100 medium and small-sized cities across the country in 100

days, to ask the people what they wanted for their own communities.

In September 2021, the RNI party won a crushing election victory, taking 102 seats in the National

Parliament and scoring 1st place in both Municipal and District Council elections. Akhannouch was

then designated Prime Minister by King Mohammed VI.

IRAQ

By 2005, Coalition occupation forces in Iraq, having removed the dictator Saddam Hussein and his

Baathist movement from power two years before, and seeking to support the country’s

transformation to democracy, found themselves embroiled in a bloody struggle against the terrorist

organisation Al-Qaeda in Iraq. It became apparent to military commanders that military power alone

could not prevail, and that the Iraqi people themselves were the centre of gravity in what had

become in effect a psychological war. But their military psychological and information operations

specialists were losing because they lacked the insight and skills to take on and defeat AQI.

This led to the formation of a special task force – led and supported by several members of our

Change Network. They set up a robust communications system that combined – on a scale not seen

since World War 2 – research, analysis and strategy development with a rapid-fire content

production unit capable of producing a highly diverse range of material that, with generous budget

support, was able to dominate the Iraqi information space.

Within its first nine months, the unit’s communications were credited with having turned the tide of

tribal opinion in the crucial Anbar province, heartland of the AQI insurgency, and inspiring the launch

of the ‘awakening movement’ among tribal leaders who agreed to throw their weight behind the

Coalition’s military effort to contain the insurgency. This led to a sharp reduction in the violence.

The strategy involved revealing AQI’s plans to use Anbar as a launch pad for violence across the

Middle East, and showing how AQI was not liberating the local tribes but merely exploiting them for

its own purposes. A captured document cache included correspondence between the insurgent

leader and AQ headquarters in Afghanistan in which he complained of being overwhelmed by the

‘American propaganda’.

The unit’s work continued across several lines of operation, supporting ethnic reconciliation and the

development of a new constitution, general stability operations, the containment of armed militia,

and countering Iranian influence. Its operations continued until the final day of the US occupation in

December 2011. Its work is considered seminal to the development of subsequent government and

commercial counterextremism operations.

SERBIA

We worked with a major Serbian civil society movement which came to

prominence in recent years during nationwide protests over government plans to license

lithium and boron deposits, and fears of major environmental impact.

The movement began to shift into electoral politics following allegations of irregularities in local and municipal

elections in the capital, Belgrade. When the government ordered a rerun of the elections, part of the opposition threatened a boycott,

jeopardising a likely opposition victory. Our client entered the arena to help establish a consolidated opposition bloc.

There was little time to organise and campaign. However, our research experts deployed fast and were able to provide voter segmentation,

strategic advice, digital activation, and political counsel.

This helped the movement to grow its support among the voters in the capital from an initial 7% to 17%.

It also transformed it into a challenger force in Belgrade city politics and a leading force within the opposition.

SOMALIA

By 2009, AMISOM, the United Nations-supported African Union Mission to Somalia, was actively

engaged in providing security and stability to the fragile Transitional Federal Government. But it

lacked the ability to communicate effectively with the civilian population or counter the influence of

the al-Qaeda linked terror group, al-Shabaab.

The UN set up information support team (IST) to fill that vital gap, and three members of our

network played leading roles in setting up and directing its operations. Their strategy combined

attributed press office activity on behalf of the African Union, the UN and the government, and

unattributed, locally authentic messaging disseminated via independent channels.

Another gap was the absence of an impartial, trustworthy source of news and entertainment in the

Somali media environment: The IST filled that gap by setting up a radio station, Bar-Kulan (Somali:

the meeting place) – an example of media sector development: if it doesn’t exist - build it. At the

same time, the IST disseminated a highly effective radio comedy that mocked al-Shabaab, as well as

numerous YouTube-style video products.

Perceptions of the AU mission, as well as the efforts of the TFG to build a political and institutional

pathway to fully fledged Somali government, and the UN-led role of the international community,

improved measurably. Within 3 years, al-Shabaab were driven from Mogadishu and most other

urban hubs and the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) replaced the TFG.