J: The New Super Office

With attention on the Republican primaries and international crises in Syria, Iran, and the eurozone, few have time to pay attention to bureaucratic politics.

But while our eyes were trained elsewhere, the Obama administration shook up the U.S. Department of State—and the result will have some important consequences for the way the United States implements the foreign policy handed down by whoever is commander in chief.

A leitmotif of Obama foreign policy has been the need to cultivate “smart power,” which is essentially that foreign policy goals can be better achieved by civilian efforts rather than the U.S. military. Last week, the administration launched a new “super office” in the State Department—the Undersecretariat for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights—which is charged with “elevating and integrating civilian security in U.S. foreign policy.”

The success of this latest reorganization will depend on whether Undersecretary of State Maria Otero—and Secretary Clinton herself—force collaboration among the disparate branches of this bureaucratic empire—and build effective partnerships with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The new super office—christened “J” for Just Society in State’s bureaucratic parlance—is a behemoth, with some 1,500 employees at home and abroad in its five bureaus and three offices. As you can see from the org chart, it includes three existing bureaus­­—Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL); International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL); Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM)—and two new ones—Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) and Counterterrorism (CT). Rounding out the J empire is the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP); an Office of Global Criminal Justice, and a new Office on Global Youth Issues (GYI) run, as it happens, by Ronan Farrow, a 22-year old country music recording artist and the son of Mia Farrow.

The new super office replaces the underpowered Undersecretariat for Democracy and Global Affairs. Created as “Global Affairs” in the Clinton administration, “G” was historically marginalized within the State bureaucracy, where powerful regional bureaus tend to run roughshod over cross-cutting, functional concerns. It did not help that G was always a hodgepodge of disparate bureaus and offices that worked on topics from ocean fisheries to counternarcotics. Like the pudding Churchill famously sent back, G “lacked a theme”.

Otero’s new undersecretariat now has a theme, and an intriguing one in a department historically focused on traditional diplomacy: It’s “civilian security,” or the protection of individuals around the world from violence, injustice, and oppression—whether at the hands of their rulers, their countrymen, or foreign governments. In embracing this agenda, the Obama administration has placed the oft-maligned concept of human security at the core of U.S. foreign policy. Self-styled “realists” may scoff, but there are pragmatic reasons for this conceptual shift. International security and regional stability increasingly depend on whether civilians enjoy peace, dignity, and fundamental freedoms. When they do not, as last year’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) pointed out, the proven results are escalating violence, mass atrocities, violent extremism, and humanitarian disasters.

A focus on civilian security has obvious ramifications for how the United States engages fragile states, war-torn nations, post-conflict transitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and democratic openings in the Arab world. It implies greater focus on aid interventions that improve the safety and dignity of individuals, including investments in disaster preparedness, the rule of law, security sector reform, and counterterrorism capacity- building, among others. The new super-office has some significant assets to advance these goals. It controls a huge share of State’s programmatic resources. But delivering on civilian security will require a willingness to break down institutional silos among the several “J” bureaus themselves, with State’s regional fiefdoms, and with USAID—which has both the mandate and funds to work in many of the same spaces.

Let’s take a closer look at J’s five bureaus—and some specific challenges they face.