# Strategic Reset

> Strategic Reset is mapped as the aftermath: it converts defeat, repression, backlash, fatigue, and unintended effects into adaptation or decay.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:failure-learning:strategic-reset` |
| Family | Failure, Backlash & Learning |
| Domain | Strategy |
| Kind | mechanism |
| Archetypal function | The Aftermath |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Strategic Reset belongs to the **Failure, Backlash & Learning** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Strategic Reset converts defeat, repression, backlash, fatigue, and unintended effects into adaptation or decay, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Strategic Reset, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Aftermath.** Strategic Reset is mapped as the aftermath: it converts defeat, repression, backlash, fatigue, and unintended effects into adaptation or decay.

## Gift

preserves memory and makes strategy revisable; through Strategic Reset, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

romanticizes failure, blames participants, or repeats harm without accountability; Strategic Reset can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Strategic Reset to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Aftermath enters through Strategic Reset. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Strategic Reset becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**resource.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Strategic Reset; another player names a countermove. Initiative 3.

## Relationships

- **translates into — Lessons Learned:** Lessons Learned translates into Strategic Reset by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **institutionalizes — Pledge:** Pledge institutionalizes Strategic Reset by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **constrains — First-Past-the-Post:** Strategic Reset constrains First-Past-the-Post by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Strategic Reset from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Strategic Reset is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Strategic Reset: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Why Civil Resistance Works](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820) — Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, 2011. Comparative study of violent and nonviolent campaigns, with scope and coding limits.
- [Church Committee Reports](https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm) — U.S. Senate, 1975–1976. Investigations of intelligence abuses and subsequent oversight reforms.
- [V-Dem Dataset and Codebook](https://www.v-dem.net/data/the-v-dem-dataset/) — V-Dem Institute, 2026. Comparative measurement of democratic institutions; indicators remain model-based measures.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
