Michael Dziedzic is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel with over 20 years of experience in the peace operations and stabilization field. His career has blended the worlds of theory and practice. His scholarly positions have included Professor at the Air Force Academy, the National War College, Georgetown University, and George Mason University as well as Senior Fellow/Program Officer at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Institute for National Strategic Studies, and US Institute of Peace. His field experience includes postings in societies emerging from protracted conflict, including El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
His publications include works that have shaped the way the U.S. approaches stability operations: Policing the New World Disorder identified a recurring “public security gap” in international interventions which led to the creation of the Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units; Quest for Viable Peace proposed that “conflict transformation” is the essence of the transition from war to sustainable peace, and this concept was adopted by the State Department’s Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization as the paradigm for U.S. strategic planning and was incorporated into the US Army Field Manual 3-07 on Stability Operations. His two recently published volumes, Criminalized Power Structures: The Overlooked Enemies of Peace and Combating Criminalized Power Structures: A Toolkit provide an extensive set of case studies documenting that criminalized power structures are the leading “spoiler” of peace and stability operations. They also provide recommendations for appropriate strategies for coping with this recurrent threat and policy actions that should be taken to strengthen the international toolkit for coping with them decisively.
