CHRISTOPHER HOLSHEK
Colonel (Retired) Christopher Holshek is an international peace & and security consultant and a senior civil-military advisor at Narrative Strategies, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and as a U.S. Global Leadership Coalition “Veteran for Smart Power.”
As such, he promotes transversal civil-military narratives on cross-cutting national and international peace and security issues through capacity and learning organization co-development and his writings.
Much of this work draws from his National Service Ride project to empower citizenship and service to community and country to help move a divided nation forward, based on his book, Travels with Harley – Journeys in Search of Personal and National Identity.
He is also a civil-military advisor for a NATO Partnership & Cooperative Security Committee research & development project on “Resilient Civilians in Hybrid and Population-Centric Warfare.”
As a vice president for the Civil Affairs Association, he develops and organizes intellectual capitalization platforms for U.S. civil affairs force development and edits the Civil Affairs Issue Papers.
A rare American with UN field mission service in civilian and military capacities in the Balkans and Africa, he is the principal author of the Peace Operations Training Institute’s course on civil-military coordination in peace operations, being updated.
A retired U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer with over three decades of civil-military conflict management experience at multiple levels and settings across the full range of operations, his assignments included: command of the first Civil Affairs battalion deployed to Iraq in support of Army, Marine and British forces; Chief of Civil-Military Coordination for the UN Mission in Liberia; and European Command Military Representative at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
For his services then and since, he was inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Civil Affairs Regiment (Corps) in 2017. He was also a senior associate with the Project on National Security Reform. In addition to his contributions to U.S. Army, Joint, NATO, and UN civil-military and peace & stability operations policy and doctrine, he has published in numerous formats on national strategy, civil-military, humanitarian, and peace & stability operations issues, including Foreign Policy, The Huffington Post, and Sicherheit & Frieden.