Welcome, El Centro Fellows | Small Wars Journal

Dear SWJ El Centro Fellows,

Welcome to El Centro, our effort to bring more focus to small wars in Latin America and the rise of powerful cartels, violent street and prison gangs, and criminal groups. It’s an issue we are all very concerned about. Thanks in advance for your participation: you bring us capability and legitimacy just by being willing to be associated with us; we hope we can help advance your work in return.

This page begins an introduction to what we’re doing and how we see, at least initially, things working with Small Wars Journal and our El Centro Fellows. We are a coalition of the willing and able, each participating as we choose. We’ll have to develop our common understanding and group norms about how we work together on this as we go along.

El Centro examines small wars in Latin America to advance understanding of and attention to the issues facing states, regions, and the hemisphere. We want to foster serious and professional information sharing, dialog, and networking that makes us all better. Small Wars Journal serves a niche between the immediacy but unpredictable quality of information posted in blogs absent an engaged community, and the more reliable but greatly delayed publication of new knowledge in laboriously referred academic journals. By pulling together a new region-specific El Centro section on top of our current modus operandi, we believe we can further serve that purpose.

The basic approach for El Centro publishing is that we will continue to publish region-specific content along with all our other content via Small Wars Journal’s blog, journal, library, etc. as appropriate, so it will get exposure to our full audience. At the same time, we’ll tag the relevant content and otherwise tweak its presentation so it also displays in the El Centro section, which we’ve begun to populate. We’re aiming for both breadth and depth in the interactions with our audience and our professional community. Technically, it’s really nothing special, just some cross-referencing and repurposing of material. Where we hope to excel is on making connections with the community amongst experts and practitioners in the field, continuing to engage with the sharpest minds and best ideas, and giving a good wire brushing to the rust spots that warrant it.

In August we rolled out a new platform for the Journal and the SWJ Blog, and we are putting the finishing touches on a new Library section and a complete revamp of the News – to make it more Drudge & Real Clear Politics like rather than the daily Roundup news digest blog entries. We’ll embed those new features with El Centro as we deploy them, so what we’ve got now with the initial Journal and SWJ Blog content is just a beginning. But we’ll get to those details later.

To move forward initially, here’s what we’re thinking with regard to expectations and what the mutual benefits will be:

The primary benefit and commitment is simply that of association with a group of like-minded professionals trying to make a difference concerning national policies regarding the evolving threat facing the Western Hemisphere.
Your public association with us lends us credibility and legitimacy because of your reputation.
As you are willing and able, we hope you will interact with the SWJ Editors and our El Centro Senior Staff on content development. How much of that you do and just what that entails, e.g. whether that be collaborating on items, reviewing things, suggesting directions to explore, publishing work of your own, etc., will depend on whatever we sort out together.
We have NO minimum expectations for production. We do enter into this expecting that we’ll collaborate in some way, shape, or form, but there are no quotas. Whatever we produce will flow when we find the right topics and alignment of mutual interests and capabilities.
On the other hand, we grant our El Centro Fellows and Associates privileges as SWJ Bloggers, which means you can publish op-ed or commentary on what you want, when you want, free from editorial interference, under your own byline in the SWJ Blog. We are read by practitioners and policy makers, and tracked by major media outlets; good content has a way of making the leap from SWJ into the hearts and minds of thinkers and doers. We have also expanded our features to provide options for hosting short and long bios for authors and for placing author-specific sidebar content of your choosing along with articles under your byline, giving you options for getting information about you, your work, and your causes out there.

As we prepare to launch El Centro, we ask you to take a look at the following things:

Review the preliminary site by visiting the following links. Note that these are live now on the internet but are blind links; when we launch, we’ll add them to the navigation bar so anyone can get to them.
Think about what you want from the site, how we can benefit the community, and whether we’re heading in the right direction with what we’ve outlined in the basic expectations here and in what you’re seeing in the draft site.
Affirm your interest in participating and either confirm we’re on target, or give us some adjustments and advice to help us onto target.
Review and confirm your bio posted on the Fellows page and your willingness to be listed as a founding member in this endeavor. See the discussion in the last paragraph of this note re the tiers of fellows.
Begin to consider what kind of content you think we need to be working on, and what you’d like your involvement to be.

We’ll do most of the initial collaboration by email and selectively by phone, and that may be all that some ever want to use (and that’s OK). There are a couple of other things in play that we can get to over time or some web savvy early adopters can lean into:

If you provide us a Google Account (see info here) we can give you permissions to access an easily edited markup site we’re using for El Centro content development, and another SWJ intranet site with a bunch of background information. The former is relevant now if you want to get involved in some of the El Centro re-work. The latter is most relevant if/when you want to publish your own blog posts.
The other thing you would need to self-publish on the SWJ Blog is an SWJ Username that we’ve powered up with some extra permissions. If any of you want to lean into that now, we’re ready to get you set up. Send us your current SWJ Username or register for one. Please note – publishing a basic entry is just filling in an HTML form and it is easy once you’ve done it, but we’re always willing to post for you a blog entry that you just want to email in. You can blog, not blog, or blog by proxy – player’s choice.

Again, thank you for your important participation as a founding member of El Centro. Just like SWJ, El Centro will probably always be a work in progress; we’re ready to roll out and go live with the first wave of work as soon as we’ve received your comments and had a chance to make the essential adjustments.

Robert Bunker and John Sullivan are the core team for El Centro at the moment. We’re calling them Senior Fellows in recognition of the time and effort they’re putting into the endeavor, rather than their seniority per se, and will add other Senior Fellows as different people take ownership of significant elements. All of our Fellows are fairly senior and established. We also have some Associates who are up & comers in the field.

The email elcentro-staff@smallwarsjournal.com is a distribution list that includes Robert and John, plus Dave Dilegge (SWJ Editor-in-Chief) and Bill Nagle (SWJ Publisher).

Sincerely,

Robert Bunker

John Sullivan

Dave Dilegge

Bill Nagle