Michael Hikari Cecire is a veteran strategic advisor and researcher with extensive experience leading, managing, and conducting policy research and developing policy alternatives across foreign policy, national security, and economic policy equities. He has advised and supported senior-most principals in government, including high-level members of Congress and senior executive branch leadership, with an approach to problem solving that emphasizes disruption and innovation in service of the mission.
Cecire is currently a senior policy advisor at the US Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (US Helsinki Commission), where he is the political-military officer and covers the Caucasus and Black Sea regions. He is a politics and international relations PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews, where he researches trilateral cooperation in the Black Sea region, and an associate at the Institute for Middle East, Central Asia, and Caucasus Studies. Cecire is a member of the editorial board for Caucasus Survey, founder of the Eurasia Democratic Security Network policy research fellowship platform based at the Democratic Security Institute in Tbilisi, and co-founder of the Georgian Institute of Politics in Tbilisi. Cecire has worked as a contracted senior researcher at the US Army War College, a US European Command (USEUCOM) subject matter expert at the Marine Corps University, and a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. He regularly lectures at the Foreign Service Institute at the US State Department.
Previously, Cecire was a senior-level analyst at the Congressional Research Service, where he focused on economic development, defense production and mobilization, disaster mitigation, and supply chain and climate resilience policy issues. He has also served as a policy advisor (contracted) at the Office of Industrial Policy at the US Department of Defense, an assistant finance director for the City of Philadelphia, a policy advisor to the former Georgian Minister of Economy, and in economic development at the New Jersey and Pennsylvania state governments.
