Current Bio
Larry Seaquist invests his energies in community development, peacebuilding, and conflict prevention. Concerned that the changing natures of war, peace and civility in our disorderly world have rendered many of our traditional policies obsolete, he works with community leaders to devise practical new instruments of self-governance.
In recent years, Mr. Seaquist contributed an op-ed column about monthly to the international daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. Those columns subsequently appear in many other newspapers in the United States and internationally. Solicited by journalists, his views are often quoted in articles in major US newspapers including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. He has appeared as a guest expert in several TV documentaries, on Fox News, Good Morning America, Sixty Minutes, and on various national and regional radio talk shows.
His work has also been published the Washington Post and professional journals including the US Naval Institute Proceedings, the Defense Intelligence Digest, and the National Security Strategy Review. He is also the invited author of an article on the history of naval strategy-making in the Oxford Companion to American Military History (OUP, 2000) and a chapter, "The Ten Foot Tall Electron," in The Information Revolution and National Security (CSIS, 1998).
He has been at work on a book, working title Steering in the Whitewater, which offers a fresh look at the state of civilization at the beginning of the 21st Century. Starting with the assertion that the world - with the US in the lead - finds itself unable to solve any of its major problems, the book outlines the profound changes in the nature of war, peace, and authority which have oc-curred since the hopeful days at the end of the Cold War and offers some guidelines for steering through the decades of turbulent challenges that lie ahead.
He is researching a second book, Civil Warring, which understands terrorist violence as one facet of a profound shift in the nature of conflict. Neighbor killing neighbor has replaced soldier vs. soldier fighting as the characteristic form of war. The front lines of battle are now found among citizens in their homes and communities, not on traditional, warriors - only battlefields. Generalship is now exercised from the shadows by malevolent demagogues rather than by military pro-fessionals. No longer a military monopoly, the technologies of violence now leave individual citizen vulnerable everywhere.
Matching these changes in war are profound alterations in the nature of peace, the strategies of security, and the methods of command. For more than a decade, Mr. Seaquist has been actively exploring these transformations and testing new approaches to peacebuilding, conflict manage-ment, and leadership.
Working with a leading Los Angles executive producer, Tracey Alexander, he acts as technical advisor to film and TV projects which dramatize issues of national security, the war on terrorism, and military professionalism. Current projects include "THE GRID," a six-hour TV dramatic series on the global network of terrorists and the counter-terrorism campaign co-produced by TNT, BBC, and Fox Studios recently broadcast by TNT in the US, shortly to be broadcast in the UK by BBC. See details at www.tnt.tv/Title/Display/0,5918,540146,00.html. He and the creative team are now at work on a sequel which will take viewers deeper into the worlds of in-ternational terrorists and nuclear weapons and the operations of US and allied counter-terror campaigns.
With his wife, Carla, he co-founded Refreshing Democracy, a non-partisan project. Directed by a group of local citizens and building on work in other American communities, the Refreshing De-mocracy project aims to, "reawaken a vigorous sense of empowered participation among our West Sound citizen-neighbors." See www.refreshingdemocracy.com.
In 1995 he founded the non-profit Strategy Group, an independent, international "do tank". Working in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Latin America, and Europe he developed a new toolkit for rapidly and inexpensively enabling concrete, locally-led conflict prevention and peacebuilding campaigns. Extending the power of wargaming to the much more complex challenges of peace, his "PeaceLabs" and "PeaceGames" equip local communities in at-war and at-risk countries to construct durable frameworks for conflict prevention and peacebuilding civil society. That international work led to requests to apply these concepts in American cities.
After successful exploratory projects with community leaders in metropolitan Seattle and Wash-ington, DC, Mr. Seaquist is now working in partnership with Dr. Joseph Bell of Seattle, Washing-ton, and a team at Ohio State University led by Ms. Diana Jackson and Ms. Darcie Slanker to de-velop the capability to catalyze, train, and support local community-building campaigns in American and as well as in international communities. Innovative "CoLab" (community-collaboration laboratory) simulations enable policy makers, business leaders, and citizens from all sides of an on-going or threatening conflict to create a practical, commonly-agreed strategy. Critically, the CoLab/PeaceLab processes go beyond traditional planning to design and launch the actual campaign which will achieve the community's objectives. More information is available online at http://www.ohiolearningwork.org/colabs.asp.
In order to connect to the hopes and idealism of the young citizens who dominate the demographics of most countries, PeaceLabs/CoLabs often blend students with senior officials and the media. Education reform is often a key component of these campaigns.
The Strategy Group also tested a Global Action Network of Peacebuilding Professionals as the backbone of a practical global conflict prevention process. The project demonstrated that sea-soned professionals could operate collegially from nine countries and twenty cities to incubate local peacebuilding architectures.
The roster of Strategy Group clients and program sponsors has included UNESCO's Director-General, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Kyrgyzstan's State Secretary and Foreign Minister, the President of Jor-dan's Institute of Diplomacy, the Rector of Colombia's Rosario University, the U.S. State Department's Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the McCormick Trib-une Foundation, Science Applications International Corporation, and the government of the U.S. State of Washington. Appointed a Senior Advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO in Paris 1994-1999, Mr. Seaquist created and directed UNESCO's innovative "Venice Process" of conflict prevention. His monograph, Professional Peacebuilding, is in its second edition in Russian, Ara-bic, Spanish and English. All three of his Venice Papers may be read on-line at www.unesco.org/venice.
A former US naval officer, Captain Seaquist commanded a number of warships including the bat-tleship USS IOWA during his 32 year career. His ships operated around the world in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea theaters. Each of his commands was awarded the Navy's excellence award, the Battle Efficiency "E". Ashore he worked in various political-military strategy assignments both in the Navy headquarters and in Joint Staff in the Pentagon.
His service as a senior security strategist in the Pentagon included an appointment as the Director of Policy Research in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the government program which engages many different civilian research organizations in the study of innovative military strategies. During the 1990-91 period leading up to the Gulf War he was Acting Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning. He has been Acting Deputy Under Secretary of De-fense for Policy. In the Pentagon, he created the strategy of "counterproliferation" - the framework for countering the post-Cold War explosion in international arms trafficking.
A member of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, the Pacific Council on International Relations, and the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, Mr. Seaquist is a director of Americans for UNESCO.
As a young man working as a meteorological technician for the US Weather Bureau's Polar Operations Service, Mr. Seaquist spent a year in the Arctic at Alaska's Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea. He followed that by wintering over for 14 months at Argentina's Ellsworth Station on the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic. He was aboard the first Argentine flight to the South Pole. He then returned to college, graduating from Oregon State University in science in 1963.
He has taught seminars at Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown and other universities; at the U.S. National, Naval, Army, and Air War Colleges; at the U.S. Naval and Military academies; and at the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department. He is sought by convention groups and civic organizations to speak about how matters of peace, war, and conflict prevention connect to citizens' concerns.
Mr. Seaquist lives in Gig Harbor, Washington near Seattle. His wife Carla Seaquist is a playwright and writer. Her play "The Washington-Sarajevo Talks," broadcast worldwide by VOA, was recently selected for production by the Festival of Emerging American Theatre in a national competition. The play was also featured in the 2003 Ottawa Canada International Writers Festival which introduced it as "the best play we know showing humans in war." Her other plays include "Kafka's Last Dream," "Excess on Their Hands," and "The Altitude of Virtue." Ms. Seaquist's essays have been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomsbury Review. She also writes regularly for the Christian Science Monitor. More information on her work and writing is available on-line at http://www.carlaseaquist.com.
Larry Seaquist is a Democratic candidate to represent the citizens of Washington's 26th Legislative District in the state legislature. Click Here to visit the campaign web site.
April '06
For More Information on Larry Seaquist, Click Below
