In the hours after North Korea launched a ballistic missile over Japan early on the morning of Aug. 29, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe started calming a frightened nation. 

Speaking on national television, the prime minister told viewers that he “was prepared to take all measures to protect people’s lives.” He said his government had “lodged a firm protest” to Pyongyang and requested an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

It was the kind of reassurance many people in Japan had wanted to hear: tough, but not bellicose. When the North Koreans hurled a second missile over Japan a month later, Prime Minister Abe issued another strong rebuke. Meanwhile, his approval rating rose to 50 percent, rebounding from a record low in July after a series of domestic scandals.

That response – along with the existence of a weak and fractured opposition – gave Abe the confidence to call a snap election on Sept. 25, a year earlier than expected. On Sunday, his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a commanding victory – albeit with the second-lowest turnout since World War II, amid a powerful typhoon. 

Retaining the LDP’s two-thirds supermajority in Japan’s lower house of parliament could be a sign of success for its hard line on North Korea. But the consequences for defense policy, a fraught topic in postwar Japan, could go further, allowing Abe to continue his pursuit of revising the country's pacifist Constitution.

Even with the votes he needs in parliament, however, Abe and his party still face the challenge of winning over a reluctant public. 

“The LDP may be able to do it over the next year or two,” says Amy Catalinac, an assistant professor of politics at New York University who studies national security issues in Japan. “But it's not a foregone conclusion by any means.”

Persuading pacifists

Japan’s Constitution was written by American occupiers after its defeat in World War II, and calls for the renunciation of war in a clause known as Article 9. Abe and his nationalist supporters have advocated revising it for years. Their aim has been to remove any doubt about the legitimacy of Japan’s military, known as the Self-Defense Forces, by amending the much-beloved pacifist clause. 

Before Sunday’s election, Abe’s ruling coalition already had a two-thirds majority in the less powerful upper house. Now he has solidified his support in the lower house, boosting his chances of winning another three-year term next September as leader of the LDP. If he wins he will become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, giving him until 2021 to achieve his longtime goal of amending the Constitution.

But in addition to getting approval by two-thirds of parliament, any change to the Constitution must also be ratified in a national referendum. Experts say getting the public on his side remains a steep hill for Abe to climb. 

Read literally, Article 9 bans Japan from having a standing military – a fact that hasn’t stopped successive governments from interpreting it to mean that the country is allowed to have one exclusively for self-defense. Abe has said he simply wants to make that status explicit.

Critics say that such a change would strike at the heart of the pacifist Constitution. They argue that it could lead to an even broader definition of self-defense than Abe has already achieved. In 2015, he helped pass legislation that allows Japan to engage in collective self-defense, or fighting for its allies when they come under enemy attack. Parliament passed the law based on a reinterpretation of the Constitution, rather than a formal revision.

Dr. Catalinac says the North Korean threat has done little to change people’s opinions about Abe’s proposed amendment. Although the LDP was able to capitalize on voters’ desire for stability, turning that into support for a constitutional revision is a considerable leap. Polls show that voters are split on whether they would approve such a measure.

“The public is not convinced that Japan needs to revise the Constitution in order to deal with North Korea,” Catalinac says. “There are people in Japan who support more dialogue, and then there are people in Japan who support more pressure.”

So far, Abe has stuck with trying to raise pressure on North Korea amid its repeated missile tests and threats to “sink” Japan into the sea. He’s called on the international community to remain united and enforce sanctions while also pushing for a trilateral meeting between Japan, China, and South Korea.

“As I promised in the election, my imminent task is to firmly deal with North Korea,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo on Sunday night. “For that, strong diplomacy is required.” 

Abe’s strategy – viewed as hawkish in Japan – has received broad support from a public that is increasingly on edge about Pyongyang’s behavior. Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Pew Research Center poll conducted last spring said increasing economic sanctions was the better option for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program. Only 25 percent of respondents said deepening ties would be more effective.

A crucial alliance

Fears of a North Korean attack have rarely, if ever, been higher in Japan. Many towns are preparing for the possibility with evacuation drills. Earlier this month, authorities on the northern island of Hokkaido published a manga comic book that explains how to survive a missile strike.

All this has pressed Abe to maintain a close relationship with US President Trump. Japan has been largely dependent on the United States for its self-defense since the end of World War II. By carefully managing the mercurial American president, Abe has attempted to alleviate another source of unease among the Japanese public: the future of the US-Japan alliance.

Yet Abe has been able to do only so much in the realm of public opinion. A separate Pew Research Center poll released last week found that more than twice as many Japanese worry that the alliance will deteriorate during the Trump administration (41 percent) as believe it will improve (17 percent). Thirty-four percent of respondents said they expected the relationship to stay about the same and 9 percent said they didn’t know.

Abe and Trump will have the chance to improve public confidence in the alliance when Trump arrives in Japan on Nov. 5 at the start of his 12-day trip across Asia. Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, says North Korea will undoubtedly be at the top of their agenda.

“Abe has lined up very closely with the Trump administration’s approach to putting more and more pressure on North Korea to try to get it back to the negotiating table,” Ms. Smith says, adding that she expects to see little controversy when the two leaders meet. “They're pretty much on the same page. The Abe cabinet is grateful that this US administration wants to be tough on this issue, because they want to be tough on this issue.”  

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Experts say men have a key role to play in preventing sexual assault and harassment in the workplace – by setting the correct tone at the top and in intervening to prevent or heal a toxic culture.

The fall from power of movie producer Harvey Weinstein suggests an American public that is growing less tolerant of sexual assault and harassment – less willing to accept it as a part of Hollywood culture or any other American workplace.

But another part of the story is that it took years before the allegations began to pour forth, a sign of of how challenging and risky it still feels for victims to bring their cases forward.

Maybe that’s changing, as women have been speaking out in recent days on social media under the hashtag #MeToo. But if this becomes a tipping-point, it may involve something more: for men to join the enough-is-enough chorus.

Some men have already been chiming up.

"I think it's up to the men," film director Rob Reiner said recently, pausing from promotion of a new movie to comment on the issue. "And I don't mean the men who are sexually abusing women. I'm talking about men who don't do that, who may be now more aware there are others doing it and call them out."

Judging by recent allegations, the work culture in Hollywood may be among the worst, when it comes to people in power preying on the vulnerable. But recent headlines about Fidelity Investments in Boston (two portfolio managers ousted recently), about a whopping $32 million settlement paid by former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, and about women in Sacramento protesting the culture of California state politics, hint at how the problem extends across the spectrum of US workplaces.

Experts on sexual violence, which is most commonly targeted at women, call this an encouraging moment, where an issue that’s too often kept quiet has the public spotlight.

They also say it’s crucial that men participate in the discussion – not just tweeting their support for #MeToo women but speaking up as needed in support of respectful culture.

“It’s going to stop when men lose status for behaving this way. That's largely going to be the task of other men calling them out,” says Chris Kilmartin, a psychologist based in Fredericksburg, Va., who trains organizations on how to improve their culture. And, he adds, “we have to teach them how to do it.”

More than just support

Dr. Kilmartin says he’s found that most men support treating women with respect, but too few take that step of speaking out against peers who cross the line. Far from being looked down upon, men will be looked up to by fellow males, he says. They just may not realize it.

Men’s voices aren’t absent from the social media tide under tags like #MeToo, #WithYou, and #IHearYou. Some say they themselves have been victims, others are supporting women for coming forward, others are acknowledging they’ve been less-than-respectful toward women in the past.

“A pretty significant number of men were writing very supportive things to women,” Kilmartin says. “It's a step in the right direction.”

He and other experts say what’s needed next is follow-through in daily life and work.   

The challenge, in part, is that power brokers often appear biased toward protecting their own when one of them may have stepped over a line.

Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Fox News extended Mr. O’Reilly’s contract for $100 million shortly after he reached a $32 million settlement of sexual harassment claims by a former network employee. (O’Reilly has called the article a “smear.”)

At the same time, Mr. Weinstein isn’t the first titan of industry to fall. The late Roger Ailes was ousted in 2016 as chairman of Fox after multiple accusations of sexual harassment surfaced.

Many victims have reason to think their jobs or career prospects could suffer by making an allegation or blowing a whistle.

At Fidelity, fairly unusual in being a woman-led investment firm, two portfolio managers were ousted reportedly over accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate comments, respectively. The events prompted a staff meeting last week at which Fidelity chief executive Abigail Johnson avowed a policy of “no tolerance at our company for any type of harassment.”

She added a plea for engagement on the issue: “I expect when issues occur, associates will raise them, so we can fix them and make sure they don’t happen again.”

Building on progress

Lynne Revo-Cohen, co-founder of the consulting firm NewPoint Strategies in McLean, Va., says she’s seen progress in some three decades of work assisting companies on high-risk issues including harassment.

“When you witness something like the Harvey Weinstein situation happening, you think, have we gotten anywhere? Will it ever end? [But] I can tell you that … there is a remarkable positive change in the workplace culture” in the past few decades.

It’s just that there’s still a long way to go.

Progress is driven both by top executives and by the rank-and-file workers, she says. The tone starts with leaders, who “need to sweat the small stuff and they need to walk the talk,” says Ms. Revo-Cohen, whose firm has worked on the issue – sometimes with Kilmartin’s help – with employers including the US military.

Others who might seem to be bystanders have a role to play. Instead of watching and listening passively, they too can change the tone by saying something when an off-color joke or indecent comment is made, Revo-Cohen says. Or they can give the support that helps victims come forward.

Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox anchor who brought allegations against Mr. Ailes, is out with a new book that aims to empower women – and men – to promote a culture of workplace decency and respect.

In a CNN interview last week, she pointed specifically to the role men can play. “I actually believe this is the tipping point and it's a lot due to men like you, Jake Tapper,” she said, commenting on a note the CNN host had sent her when she brought her case against Ailes. “You have no idea how much it meant to me that as a man you reached out to me in my darkest days and you said that I was a role model for your children, both your son and your daughter.”

John Locher/AP

Workers install a #VegasStrong banner on the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Oct. 16. Las Vegas's efforts to rebrand itself since an Oct. 1 mass shooting show just how difficult it can be for organizations to hit the right tone after a deeply tragic event. The city put its famous "What happens here, stays here" slogan on hold, and its initial ad campaign after the attack won praise for its sensitivity. But a national TV commercial that features real social media posts from after the shooting is getting more mixed reviews, with some calling it tacky.

For a week after the shooting, Christopher Mendoza thought he was fine.

A wellness counselor for HIV-positive individuals at a Las Vegas nonprofit, Mr. Mendoza focused on his clients’ needs in the days following the Oct. 1 tragedy, when Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd attending a concert outside Mandalay Bay. “Everyone that walked through my door client-wise needed to talk and just unload,” Mendoza says. “I tried just giving them positive thoughts: ‘It’s OK to leave your house. You're safe. This is your home. Do not be afraid.’

“I don’t think I believed it myself.”

That became clear the Saturday after the shooting, when Mendoza found himself yelling at a stranger at a local bar. The man had made some flippant comment about the event, he recalls. “I kind of blew up on him,” says Mendoza, who left the bar in tears. “I guess you could say I finally broke.”

Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor

It took Christopher Mendoza a full week to confront his feelings about the mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay hotel that killed 59 people on Oct. 1. Mr. Mendoza, who counsels HIV-positive individuals at the Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada, says he focused on his clients' needs rather than his own in the days following the tragedy. 'It still gets me shaky, just talking about it,' Mendoza says on Oct. 20 at the Community Counseling facility in Las Vegas. 'We’re all still working through it.'

The massacre in Las Vegas was among the deadliest mass shootings in US history, with 59 people killed. The incident has revived debate over issues such as gun control and the definition of terror. But experiences like Mendoza’s – recounted in support groups and therapy sessions across the city in the weeks following the tragedy – speak to another concern: how to help members of a community cope with a traumatic event.

“Often we frame [mental health] as looking at what happens to individuals,” says Arthur Evans Jr., chief executive officer of the American Psychological Association (APA). That’s important, he says. But it’s just as crucial to examine how mass shootings and terror attacks affect survivors, families of victims, first responders, and the community at large – and come up with strategies to help.

“Are there things we can do to mitigate the likelihood that people will get post-traumatic stress disorder, or other symptoms [after a mass trauma]?” asks Dr. Evans. “It’s a different way of thinking about it.”

Coming together after tragedy

The night of the shooting, Mendoza gave his longtime partner, who was visiting from Colorado, a tour of Mandalay Bay. They wandered for an hour around the same tower from which Mr. Paddock would rain gunfire into a crowd of 22,000. They planned to have a late dinner at the hotel but decided they were too tired. They went back to Mendoza’s place, a five-minute drive away.

Their phones started going off as soon as they walked in. Worried messages poured in from Mendoza’s family in California. Their social media accounts began blowing up with news of the shooting. From the backyard of his home, Mendoza could see Mandalay Bay – and hear the police sirens and screams. He kept trying to reach friends who worked on the Strip. Nobody slept.

He took the next day off work, but by Tuesday Mendoza was back at his office at the Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada, helping clients process the horror of Sunday night.

On the one hand, it was a testament to the city’s resilience. Across Las Vegas, locals like Mendoza stepped up to the aid of survivors and fellow residents. They gave time, money, food, even blood. Volunteers built a memorial garden downtown. Dozens of clinics and wellness centers, including Community Counseling, offered free support groups and therapy for anyone who felt they needed to unload. “It was really, really amazing to see the city come together so fast,” says Mendoza (who is no relation to the reporter).

But the city’s response also highlighted the gaps in support in the wake of a mass trauma – and the need to be better prepared. Community Counseling saw its resources stretched thin, as staff worked overtime to accommodate people's needs. Others found it more difficult to get the word out that they were offering services. “We could have had and we can have more people come to the sessions we're offering,” says Asher Adelman, chief executive officer of Alta Wellness Center, just west of downtown. “How do we get these resources into the hands of people who need them?”

Even those in the mental health field weren’t entirely prepared. Mendoza says that after what he calls his meltdown that Saturday, he has made an extra effort to take care of himself so that he can better attend to his clients. Ronald Lawrence, founder of Community Counseling, was called in to a local hospital the day after the shooting to provide support to doctors and nurses on duty at the emergency room that night.

Mr. Lawrence has provided counseling for first responders before. Still, “I was just unable to eat the rest of that day,” he says. “It was too hard.”

An action plan could help address some of those gaps in mental health services and capacities, says Evans at the APA. “Communities come together really well, but you’re not going to be as effective as if you organize prior to these events,” he says.

Creating a 'trauma-informed community'

For the most part, the mental health community has focused its efforts on treating trauma in individuals – victims of sexual abuse, for instance, or survivors of car accidents.

The Sept. 11 attacks began to change the conversation, as mental health researchers and practitioners started to recognize the long-term effects, not just on individuals, but on communities. Terror attacks and mass shootings violate people’s sense of safety and security – sometimes for years, says Yuval Neria, professor of medical psychology and director of the PTSD research program at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Yet the response to such events today still essentially mirrors what happened after 9/11, Professor Neria says: “There was a massive surge of money and attention early on, and then people were left to their mental health issues with a handful of mental health professionals to deal with them. That’s not the way to deal with mass trauma.”  

Some communities have tried to develop more proactive approaches. After the 2011 massacre of 69 people at a summer camp on Utøya Island, Norway – about 25 miles northwest of Oslo – mental health professionals and municipal crisis teams contacted survivors as well as bereaved families to gauge how well they were doing. They were screened, provided a contact person, and those who showed signs of risk for mental health issues were connected to specialized services.

Studies later showed that the strategy not only provided targeted support to the people who needed it most; it also gave researchers a fuller understanding of how mass trauma affects those who are indirectly exposed.

Closer to home, in Philadelphia, Evans, the city's former commissioner of behavioral health, worked with local mental health professionals to train lay people to identify signs of mental health challenges and connect others to existing resources. They brought in trauma experts to hospitals so that survivors of, say, gang shootings could be treated both physically and mentally. They organized community art projects and hosted events to educate the public.

“We were trying to create a trauma-informed community and heighten the understanding of these issues ... and build capacity in community institutions,” Evans says. The hope was that the city would be primed to face not only the daily difficulties of dealing with mental health issues, but also those that might come with a mass traumatic event.

Opportunity for change

Though they are gaining ground, such efforts face considerable challenges. Most cities and states already struggle to provide basic health care for their constituencies. When resources are scarce, attention often goes to the worst and present cases – leaving little left over for precautionary measures, Evans and others say. Also, while there’s less stigma around mental health, treatment is still viewed mostly as a personal rather than a societal issue, even by many in the field.

But probably the biggest obstacle to preparing communities to deal with trauma are the communities themselves.

“A community often has to be directly impacted in order to take things seriously,” says Charles Figley, a professor who specializes in disaster mental health at the Tulane University School of Social Work in New Orleans. “We don’t want to think about the possibility of our community experiencing a disaster that we have to prepare for.”

Which is why a tragedy like the Las Vegas shooting is an opportunity for change.

Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor

Aaronelle Matta (l.) and Patrick Bozarth meet at a group counseling room at the Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada on Oct. 17 in Las Vegas. Both helped craft the center's response to the Oct. 1 mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay hotel, which killed 59 people. 'Agencies like ours are becoming more trauma-informed and focusing on crisis intervention,' says Mr. Bozarth. 'I think that's a really good result of such a horrible tragedy.'

Patrick Bozarth, executive director at Community Counseling, feels optimistic. “Agencies like ours are becoming more trauma-informed and focusing on crisis intervention,” he says. “I think that’s going to just continue and I think that’s a really good result of such a horrible tragedy.”

Still, the going is likely to be slow. Mendoza points out that, like him, some residents are only just coming to grips with what happened. Even now, three weeks after the fact, he still tries to avoid Las Vegas Boulevard. “It still gets me shaky, just talking about it,” Mendoza says. “It’s not something you get over overnight. We’re all still working through it.”

Charlie Riedel/AP

Elementary students look after the school's mule during morning chores on Dec. 12, 2013 at the Walton 21st Century Rural Life Center in Walton, Kan. Located in a small farming community, the school faced closing before re-establishing itself as an agriculture-focused charter school.

Like many towns its size, Marine on St. Croix, Minn. – population 694 – is all too familiar with the challenge of keeping a small rural school alive. 

A years-long battle to stop the town's only public school from closing came to an end earlier this year, with the district citing low enrollment rates as reason for shutting it down. In June, Marine Elementary School sent students off to summer break for the last time, marking what could have been the end of a nearly-170-year history of education in the town. 

Where one school door closed in Marine on St. Croix, however, another promptly opened. River Grove, a K-6 charter school established and run by members of the local community, welcomed its inaugural student body in August, drawing 166 students from Marine on St. Croix and the surrounding area.

With an emphasis on outdoor learning and place-based lesson plans, River Grove is not an exact replacement for its traditional public predecessor. But its existence reflects a subtle yet notable trend across rural America in recent decades, as some small towns hit by school closures and consolidation consider charter schools as a way to re-establish or retain community schools. 

"In rural areas ... some communities are seeing chartering as a resource rather than a threat," says Paul T. Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. 

Observers say charters are not a typical solution – and not without pitfalls, such as a complicated and lengthy application process. But when the alternative is no school at all, some places – in states including Idaho and Oregon – are willing to try, especially to preserve a valued community hub.

Those who live in and study small towns say a school can offer a rural locale social, economic, and political benefits that can't be replicated by any other type of business or institution. Residents of some of these towns see maintaining a school as essential to the survival of their community. 

"We have the church and the gas station and the general store, but the school is really a centerpiece of the community," says Ele Anderson, office manager at River Grove and mother of a sixth-grade student there. "That cohesiveness was going to be lost if we didn't keep a school." 

Not a typical charter setting

Charter schools are more often thought of as options in urban settings, where professional management groups such as KIPP or Achievement First have made inroads. Less frequently discussed are the 16 percent of charter school students living in rural areas, attending schools that often look quite different – both in management and content – from their urban counterparts.  

Nationally, about 44 percent of all charters are professionally managed by either a non-profit Charter Management Organization (CMO) or a for-profit Educational Management Organization (EMO), according to data from 2014-15. Just 19 percent of rural charters are operated by CMOs or EMOs, however, with 81 percent run independently, often by local community groups, based on data from 2009-10. 

In rural places affected by public school consolidation, the argument for keeping a community school through chartering often extends beyond academics. A school can provide a small town with economic benefits, employing residents and consequently helping out local businesses, notes Mara Tieken, an associate professor of education at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. 

Less tangibly, Professor Tieken and others say, a school can be a powerful force for building relationships between members of the community and giving a town an identity.

"In some rural places, [losing a school] can be pretty devastating," she says. "As we think about rural sustainability … schools need to be an important part of that conversation."

In Minnesota, for example, River Grove founders say the school was born out of a growing desire for a community-run, community-centric education option. (They note that the process to establish the charter had already begun before the closure of Marine Elementary School.) 

Nurturing a connection with the town

Part of working toward rural sustainability at River Grove and other charters involves nurturing a deeper connection between students and their hometowns through place-based education and involvement with the local community. At River Grove, this means lots of outdoor time and hands-on science lessons to reflect the natural setting of Marine on St. Croix. 

The Sugar Valley Rural Charter School, a community-run school in Loganton, Pa., employs a similar strategy to bolster students' appreciation of the local farming culture. The charter school, founded by a group of parents in 2000 after the closure of Loganton's longtime K-12 public school, also teaches the region's agricultural history to its 485 students. 

"I think it’s important that we don't lose that," says Tracie Kennedy, the school’s chief executive officer. "They need to understand how people in the Valley worked hard and what they did to create the economy we live in now." 

The goal of place-based learning at Merrimac Community Charter School in Merrimac, Wis., is to instill in students a sense of pride in where they come from, according to Sid Malek, lead teacher at the school, which was established in 2006. The school transitioned from a traditional public elementary school to a charter, through an effort led by school employees. 

To encourage relationships between students and members of the community, the school has neighbors volunteer to give lessons in areas of expertise such as gardening, baking, and art.

"For kids to learn about their place means they're going to care about it," Malek says. "And that's what we want them to do as adults as well."

Charters not always embraced

As in urban neighborhoods, charter schools aren't always fully embraced by rural communities, where some critics argue that they draw students and funds away from already-struggling traditional public schools.

"Closing a community's school always has consequences, and this is true whether a charter opens in its place or not," says Karen Eppley, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "While the charter option can keep a school in the community, the charter often brings a host of new problems."

Charters can be a "significant drain" on a district's finances, Professor Eppley and other critics note. They also often employ less experienced teachers, and have the potential to divide a community between families who send their children to the charter school and those who do not. 

Community tensions aside, the charter application process requires time, money, and a certain level of educational and bureaucratic know-how – resources that may not be available in smaller or poorer communities, notes Terry Ryan, chief executive officer of Bluum, an organization that works with rural charter schools in Idaho.  

"It works if you've got the right people," Mr. Ryan says. "But it's hard to have those ingredients come together in a small town." 

Measured success

Seventeen years after its founding, the Sugar Valley Rural Charter School is still reflecting on whether it's been successful in filling the void left in the community by the traditional public school.

There have been challenges, certainly, and not all in the local community have fully embraced the school, acknowledges Carla McElwain, one of the original founders of the charter. But still she answers, firmly, "Yes." 

"We're quite proud of it," she says, citing the school's newly constructed 15-room building as evidence of success. "We must be doing something right." 

Ms. Kennedy, the school's CEO, isn't so sure the charter school has completely filled the void. All in all, she says, the school-community relationship has vastly improved over the past two decades. But she doesn't quite feel that the Sugar Valley Rural Charter School has been "100 percent successful yet" in its goal of becoming a "hub of the community."

Back in the days of the traditional public school, she recalls, high school sports were a popular attraction for locals. She's hopeful that building a new gymnasium and expanding the charter school's athletic offerings will help rally neighbors around something to root for. 

One month into River Grove's existence, administrator Drew Goodson is also hopeful. For now, he says, the school's goal is simple: to stay open. But his vision for the future of River Grove is more ambitious. 

"We have the philosophy that it takes a village to raise a child," he says. "We want to use the whole community to educate our kids and really be entrenched so that generations of kids can come here."  

Lt. Col. Faye Cuevas says the two decades she spent fighting terror networks was the perfect preparation for her current job: saving elephants in Kenya.

Intelligence missions, including the 2006 kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, taught the US Air Force officer that classified intelligence is “only one piece of the puzzle.” She and other intelligence support officers learned to look for nontraditional clues when assessing the security of an area. It was in Africa, while working on a mission targeting the Lord’s Resistance Army, that she first started relying on the intuition of elephants. 

The presence of elephants, it turned out, was a surprisingly reliable indicator of an area’s safety. During migration, elephants follow paths etched in memory, but they adjust those routes to avoid areas that they sense may be unsafe. By studying the movements of elephant herds, she was able to help keep the members of her unit safe.

She left active duty to return the favor. If clues from the natural world add nuance to information gathered from sophisticated intelligence streams employed by the military, perhaps military technology and strategy could help inform the fight against poaching. 

“There were hard-fought and valuable lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that we could apply to achieve a more disruptive effect [in poaching],” says Cuevas. “Whether you are in Al Qaeda or ISIL, you have to have a local network that you tap into and it works the same for [the] wildlife network. It is a constellation of actors.”

To better understand those actors, Cuevas has brought cutting-edge technology more commonly associated with modern warfare to the anti-poaching fight. The same geospatial mapping techniques and data analysis used by the US military to fight terrorism are now being deployed in a sophisticated offense to rival poachers’ criminal networks.

And those efforts appear to be paying off. Between May and September, with the help of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), Cuevas's group the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) facilitated the arrest of 21 suspects during counter-poaching operations. Together, the two groups helped reduce poaching in Kenya's Tsavo National Parks by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017. In some previous hotspots, poaching appears to have ceased entirely.

SOURCE:

Source: CITIES Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) data

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Karen Norris/Staff

Other groups borrow from military protocols to combat poaching as well, but many of those efforts focus on launching an all-out war on poaching, complete with gun battles. Critics of that approach caution that “green militarization” encourages an arms race and marginalizes impoverished communities. Others say counter-poaching efforts should focus on reducing demand for ivory in Asia.

Cuevas says her approach is different because it works directly with local communities and relies more on data than weaponry.

“Data and information are the new ammunition,” says Cuevas, in a video produced by IFAW, where she is a senior vice president. 

Cuevas started working for the IFAW two years ago. The group is headquartered in Yarmouth Port, Mass., but Cuevas now lives in Nairobi, where she leads the organization’s tenBoma program in the Tsavo Parks. 

The program borrows from a community policing philosophy known as nyumba kumi, or “10 houses” that look out for one another, similar to a neighborhood watch. TenBoma merges that idea with the Swahili concept of boma, which refers to an open area of bush that offers shelter and safety. The program’s mission is to improve information sharing among disparate anti-poaching efforts and to carve out a network of safe spaces for elephants among Kenya’s national parks and surrounding areas.

‘Left of the Kill’

Halfway around the world in Boston, Cuevas and IFAW president Azzedine Downes offered a glimpse into the thinking behind the group’s current strategy at the city’s HUB Week ideas festival earlier this month.

Mr. Downes began his speech by telling the audience that one elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its ivory.

“During this talk, four elephants will be killed,” he told the somber crowd. At this rate, he added, elephants may be extinct in 10 years – a timeframe that has been tossed around by other conservationists. 

And while the demand for ivory needs to be discouraged, said Downes, conservationists need to take this poaching rate seriously and stop the kill before it happens. That’s where Cuevas’s military experience comes in.

While in Iraq in 2005, Cuevas says she witnessed one of the most successful counterterrorism strategies she's seen. It arose from the ability to zoom out and address the context of a chronic threat, in this case improvised explosive devices (IEDs) scattered along the roadside.

As IED prevention efforts stalled, generals in Baghdad told Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli that they needed more equipment to get “left of the boom” because the small bombs could easily be hidden in street garbage. 

“Chiarelli said, ‘Well, let’s pick up the garbage then,’ ” Cuevas recalled. 

“That's what I fixated on: How can we deny the poachers operational space?” Downes said. “We can't let the bombs go off and then chase the bad guys. We have to ... stay working on the side of the explosion before it happens. So we started thinking, how do we get ‘left of the kill?’ ”

Courtesy of IFAW

During migration, elephants follow paths etched in memory, but they adjust those routes to avoid areas that they sense may be unsafe. By studying the movements of elephant herds, Colonel Cuevas was able to help keep the members of her unit safe.

By zooming out its focus and incorporating broad data analysis, IFAW began to spot seemingly unrelated patterns that could signal that poachers had moved into an area before they actually made a strike.

“[We] map out layer upon layer upon layer, and think in ways that a typical conservation group would not think,” Downes explained. Eventually, “a pattern emerges.”

One pattern that emerged was a spike in petty crime, such as theft of tea or food from nearby communities, prior to a big hunt. Another pointed to increased traffic at motorcycle repair shops as poachers had their bikes checked before heading out into the bush. 

IFAW also monitors communities’ relationships with nearby elephants. If particular elephants have been damaging a family’s crops, their community may be less likely to share tips with rangers.

Game the change

Historically, militarized anti-poaching efforts have fostered mistrust of conservationists among local communities, says Libby Lunstrum, an associate professor of geography at York University in Toronto who has studied poaching in South Africa since 2003. 

Poachers need to have an understanding of the area, which means they often have ties to nearby villages. Local sympathy to conservation efforts may harden if a neighbor’s son, for instance, is killed by rangers for suspicious activity. Instead of pushing for bigger guns, Professor Lunstrum says conservationists need to focus on the economic circumstances that drive poachers to poach in the first place. 

“Militarized approaches don't take reality of poverty seriously. It is more of a short-term response,” says Lunstrum. “It's about seeing the poachers as a part of the communities.”

But it's hard to have it both ways, says Francis Massé, also a poaching researcher at York University.

“Taking a military approach on one hand and trying to do community work on the other hand, it's kind of a contradiction,” says Mr. Massé. “There is a tension around trying to do both.”

Courtesy of IFAW

Rangers with Kenya Wildlife Services practice data tracking techniques.

But Cuevas says there is a difference between weaponization and the military tactics she is working to implement from the ground up, with community leadership.

There is a line, adds Downes, and he is careful not to cross it. IFAW has not, and does not plan to, create its own private militia to stop poaching – “Something that is rightly criticized,” says Downes, and that invites more conflict to highly politicized conflict areas. Instead, his organization embeds trained officials into existing law enforcement and park protection services to combat violence that he says already exists.

IFAW is gearing up to expand tenBoma into Malawi and Zambia in December, and eventually plans to bring the program to the Periyar Tiger Reserve in India. 

Time is running out to identify the single game changer that is going to flip the script, says Cuevas. “It is time to bring all those game changers together in a collaborative environment, because it is time to game the change. We don’t want to be the generation that lost the elephants.”

AP Photo

An aerial shot on Oct. 19 shows damaged buildings in Raqqa, Syria, two days after Syrian Democratic Forces said that military operations to oust the Islamic State group have ended.

In a highly symbolic victory against Islamic State (ISIS) last week, the US military helped liberate the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa after a four-month battle. Once a thriving Syrian city of more than 200,000 people, however, Raqqa today has been reduced to rubble while most residents have fled. Land mines laid by ISIS and a lack of basic services have kept many people from returning.

Now the United States and its allies are asking: Can Raqqa be restored, perhaps even made into a symbol of peace in the Middle East?

Over the past year, other cities in Syria and Iraq have been retaken from ISIS. But Raqqa stands out because it was the first big city taken by the group in 2014. Its tragic plight also represents a basic issue for the region: Terrorists arise in places with a political and social vacuum. In Raqqa’s case, the vacuum was the result of a civil war in Syria between pro-democracy forces and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

The city is now in the hands of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-Arab coalition. The US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries are considering ways to stabilize Raqqa and raise money for its reconstruction. Yet finding the money may be the easy part.

To save Raqqa from both terrorists and the Assad regime, the SDF and its newly established Raqqa Civil Council must quickly establish a broad and democratic government. Residents will return if they know there is a system in place that can peacefully resolve ethnic and religious rivalries. Wars may be won by the force of arms but peace can only be kept by the force of ideals, such as freedom, respect, and equality.

The US has struggled in Afghanistan and Iraq to help establish stable, democratic government. And it has totally failed at that task in Libya. A liberated Raqqa, however, offers an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and create a model in a region beset by religious violence.

ISIS may be largely defeated as a fighting group. But its ideas of intolerance must still be countered by living examples of reconciliation between people.