Corioli Institute

11/05/2026

How do you design pedagogy in the midst of a violence crisis?

Since the capture of cartel kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in September 2024, over 6,000 people have been killed or forcibly disappeared in , Mexico. Last week, the Corioli Institute joined a strategic conversation convened by the Universidad Católica de Culiacán (UCC) and the Diocese of Culiacán on the future of education in the state.

The central question was what kind of learning environment can help young people build agency, belonging, and practical capacities when violence has reshaped daily life. A few methodological takeaways stood out:

📍 Start with the lived context. Curriculum design has to account for how insecurity affects attendance, trust, family economies, mobility, and students’ sense of future.

🧭 Build capabilities, rather than just credentials. The question is not only whether students complete a program, but whether they develop the capacity to act, collaborate, adapt, and sustain themselves under adverse conditions.

🤝 Make pedagogy participatory. Students should not only receive knowledge; they should help shape the questions, problems, and forms of applied learning that matter in their own environment.

🏫 Treat belonging as prevention infrastructure. A school can become a counterweight to recruitment pressures when it offers safety, recognition, peer connection, and a credible path forward.

🔁 Design for practice, feedback, and iteration. In crisis settings, learning has to move between classroom, community, reflection, and action.

We are excited to help shape debates at the intersection of and ; the careful design of institutions that help people imagine and build alternatives under conditions where alternatives can feel scarce. Building these institutions works best through multisectoral engagement, which is why we are grateful to UCC and the Diocese of Culiacán for hosting this timely conversation. 🐺🌱

08/05/2026

🪖 This week, we co-hosted the panel “Colombians Fighting in International Conflicts: Implications for Democracy, Security, and National Defense” (Spanish Recording Below) with Fundación Konrad Adenauer - Colombia and G.P.S Agency at Universidad Santo Tomás in Bogotá. The event brought together distinguished experts from the security, defense, policy, academic, and media sectors.

💡 Key insights from the panel included:

1. Not all Colombians fighting abroad can be classified under the same legal or political category. Panelists emphasized that Colombians formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces should not automatically be described as “mercenaries.” International law requires a more precise assessment of legal status, contractual arrangements, command structures, and the nature of the conflict.

2. The issue is not new, but its scale and implications are changing.
Colombians have participated in international security and defense markets for decades. However, contemporary conflicts — especially those involving drones, hybrid warfare, transnational recruitment networks, and private military actors — have intensified the strategic relevance of this phenomenon.

3. Veteran reintegration is a national security priority. Dr. McFee emphasized that the return of Colombians with advanced combat experience should be treated not only as a social reintegration issue, but also as a matter of national security. Many returning veterans possess highly specialized knowledge in areas such as drones, explosives, battlefield medicine, intelligence, and irregular warfare.

4. Colombia faces both risks and opportunities. Without adequate support, returning combatants may be vulnerable to recruitment by illegal armed groups, criminal networks, or foreign security markets. With the right institutional pathways, however, their skills could contribute to Colombia’s defense capacity, emergency response systems, demining, security innovation, and veteran-led public service.

5. Economic insecurity remains a key driver. Several speakers noted that many former soldiers and police officers seek work abroad because of limited employment opportunities, reduced income after retirement, family obligations, and insufficient transition support. Addressing this phenomenon requires looking beyond individual decisions and toward the structural conditions that shape them.

6. Colombia needs clearer policy, stronger protections, and better transition systems. The panel called for improved legal clarity, stronger consular and institutional support, more robust veteran employment pathways, psychosocial services, and mechanisms to prevent exploitation, deception, and abandonment in foreign conflict zones.

We thank the university for hosting and the experts who spoke alongside our founder Dr. Erin McFee on the panel: Jesús Alberto Ruiz Mora, Guillermo León León, TC Juan Camilo Mejía Prieto and Stephany Echavarría.

Implicaciones para la Democracia y la Seguridad y Defensa Nacionales.

28/04/2026

The Berghof Foundation report’s sharpest finding is that conflict resolution in Niger and the Sahel is often misread when mediation is treated as a transferable technical instrument rather than a lived social practice.

It draws on interviews with customary authorities, women mediators, youth leaders, former rebels, researchers and civil society actors. Its strongest contribution is methodological, treating speech, silence, memory, posture and relational legitimacy as part of how conflict is managed on the ground.

Promising aspects: the report foregrounds dispersed authority, overlapping traditional, religious and political roles, and trust-based local mediation as operational realities.

Areas of concern: the same dynamics that make local mediation effective — coded speech, guarded knowledge, relational access — are difficult for international actors to recognize, fund, monitor or translate responsibly.

The implication is precisely that mediation design can fail not from lack of tools, but from misreading the terrain those tools enter.

🔗 Read more: https://reliefweb.int/report/niger/cultural-blind-spots-conflict-resolution-niger-and-sahel-recognising-traditional-dynamics-better-support-local-mediators

23/04/2026

Recently, Dr. Erin McFee spent time sitting and listening to Ukrainain soldiers and veterans speak not only about the war, but about what comes after it.

In this conversation, a veteran speaks clearly about what many societies struggle to confront – that service in war creates obligations that do not end when someone leaves the military.

His point is not about symbolic gratitude. It is about responsibility. When people spend weeks, months, or years in war, risk their lives, and return with injuries, visible or invisible, reintegration cannot be reduced to simply finding a job and moving on. For many veterans, that expectation can feel like a second battle – being asked to carry extraordinary sacrifice in private while the rest of society returns to ordinary life.

Veterans should not have to rebuild alone. Housing, financial stability, family security, and long-term support are not secondary concerns. They are part of what it means to take reintegration seriously.

At Corioli Institute, these issues are central to how we think about postwar recovery. Reintegration is not only about whether individuals can adapt. It is also about whether states, institutions, and communities are willing to recognize what has been carried on their behalf – and to respond in ways that are practical, durable, and shaped by veterans’ real experiences.

If reintegration is going to mean more than survival after service, it has to ask a harder question: What does a society truly owe the people who carried war for it?

23/04/2026

💡 This The Guardian article shows how addiction among Ukrainian soldiers is more commonly being treated as a wartime health issue shaped by trauma, rather than a "disciplinary" issue.

The piece by Pjotr Sauer, there are some genuinely notable signs of thoughtful practice on the ground: a Kyiv clinic treating addiction and psychological trauma together, commanders who are increasingly sending soldiers to treatment instead of simply punishing them, and staff with military or lived addiction experience who seem able to build trust quickly with patients. The article also points to growing interest in new PTSD treatments and international research.

At the same time, the tensions are hard to miss. There is still no clear official picture of the scale of the problem. Treatment remains limited, stigma persists, and frontline manpower shortages mean some soldiers return to service before recovery is complete. In that context, even reducing drug use rather than ending it entirely can become the practical benchmark.

What the article captures especially well is the implementation reality that wartime addiction care is not operating in a clinical vacuum. It is being shaped, constrained, and redefined by the demands of mobilization itself.

🔗 Read more:

Troops frequently use substances to help cope with untreated PTSD and anxiety, producing a negative spiral

20/04/2026

🔍 Countering the Houthis through repeated military strikes alone risks reinforcing the very narrative that helps sustain them. In War on the Rocks, Dr. Erin McFee and Gillian Gordon argue that a more effective U.S. approach would pair narrowly scoped deterrence with economic stabilization, supply-chain disruption, and support for locally rooted governance alternatives.

💡Drawing on original Corioli Institute data from 249 face-to-face interviews across 12 Yemeni governorates, the piece shows that many Yemenis are driven less by ideology than by economic precarity, distrust in elites, and the search for security, salaries, and viable local authority. The implication is clear: strategy should weaken the Houthis’ recruitment base and patronage networks without deepening the grievances that make them stronger.

🔗 Read more: https://warontherocks.com/how-to-counter-the-houthis-without-strengthening-them/

14/04/2026

During our founder's recent trip to Ukraine, she spent time sitting down with soldiers and veterans, hearing their stories, and exploring one of the most important questions in postwar recovery: what does it actually take to return from war?

Here, a Ukrainian veteran describes a distinction that is easy to miss from the outside. Before a mission, there is time for fear, doubt, and hesitation. But once combat begins, there is no space for that. The body moves into action. Survival takes over. Only later, when it is calm and safe again, does the mind begin to catch up with what has happened.

For many veterans, returning is not a single transition point. It is a longer process that unfolds across memory, identity, relationships, and everyday life. And for those who came into war from ordinary civilian roles, that distance between wartime function and civilian reality can be especially difficult to navigate. Reintegration cannot be understood only as a practical transition out of military service. It has to begin with veterans’ own experience – with how war has shaped their bodies, their minds, their relationships, and their sense of self.

At Corioli Institute, this is central to how we understand reintegration and how we loook at the way communities, institutions, and systems are prepared to receive people in ways that rebuild trust, dignity, and connection after violence. That is part of what it means to 'rebuild the social fabric'.

What do societies need to understand more deeply if they want return from war to be more than survival in a different setting?

08/04/2026

"Después del abatimiento de 'El Mencho'. La vulnerabilidad estratégica de las operaciones anticártel en México" de Jonathan Röders y Erin K. McFee en https://bit.ly/4spHFwx

08/04/2026

🔍 The killing of a cartel kingpin is often framed as a decisive victory. In practice, it frequently triggers new cycles of instability, fragmentation, and harm for civilians.

💡 In our latest article for Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, Jonathan Röders and Dr Erin McFee draw on original data collected over the last year in Culiacán, Sinaloa to examine the strategic vulnerabilities of cartel “decapitation” operations.

Our findings show that while high-value target strategies are often treated as markers of success in U.S.–Mexico security cooperation, they can also fracture illicit orders, intensify succession struggles, undermine livelihoods, and place community-based forms of civic resilience — from sports programmes to rehabilitation centres — under greater threat.

🔗 Versión en español: https://revistafal.com/despues-del-abatimiento-de-el-mencho/

🔗 English version:https://2fd28434-6025-4c83-902e-f6eb06aeb2b6.usrfiles.com/ugd/2fd284_aa5020ca150b43349dd3dc2988c470d6.pdf

01/04/2026

At Corioli Institute, our work begins with a simple premise: conflict does not only destroy places. It changes people.

In Ukraine, Dr. Erin McFee’s recent fieldwork with soldiers, veterans, and frontline communities continues to reinforce a critical point. While much attention has rightly focused on the technologies reshaping war, the deepest transformation is human. War changes how people make decisions, how they assess risk, how they move through the world, and how they imagine returning to ordinary life.

These are not marginal effects. They shape what recovery, reintegration, and reconstruction actually require.

If postwar planning focuses only on damaged infrastructure or institutional capacity, it risks overlooking the lived realities of the people most shaped by the war itself. For Corioli Institute, this is why reintegration must be approached as both a social and human process – one that takes identity, adaptation, and lived experience seriously.

If reconstruction is meant to restore society, how do we ensure it takes seriously the people most transformed by war?

25/03/2026

Great to be part if this new partnership with our friends at the Центр ветеранів ССО / SOF veterans center ! We are fortunate to have such incredible organizations on our side to exchange expertise and grow in our endeavors!💪🇺🇦

Асоціація ветеранів ССО уклала меморандум про співпрацю з Corioli Institute — міжнародною організацією, що працює у сфері реінтеграції ветеранів, відновлення громад та посилення соціальної згуртованості після конфліктів.

Співпраця спрямована на обмін досвідом, реалізацію спільних проєктів та розвиток ефективних рішень для підтримки ветеранів і їх повернення до цивільного життя.

Об’єднуємо зусилля, щоб посилювати спроможність ветеранської спільноти та створювати нові можливості для відновлення і розвитку.
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The SOF Veterans Association has signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Corioli Institute, an international organization working in the field of veteran reintegration, community recovery, and strengthening social cohesion in post-conflict environments.

The partnership is aimed at exchanging expertise, implementing joint projects, and developing effective solutions to support veterans and their transition to civilian life.

We are joining efforts to strengthen the veteran community and create new opportunities for recovery and development.