[2021] Risks, Dangers, and Threat Models: Evaluating Security Analysis for Conflict Practitioners (original) (raw)

2021, Better Evidence Project

The risks to conflict practitioners, peacemakers, humanitarian aid workers, and others serving ‘in the field’ are diverse, deeply contextual, and ever-changing. While ample literature exists focused around documenting and evaluating the history of these dangers, far fewer resources have been authored to promote a comprehensive, proactive, and agile framework for predicting, observing, and understanding risks and threats to one's safety and security. While it is true that many organizations provide their employees with carefully-written guides containing security ‘dos and don’ts,’ what are practitioners meant to do when the conditions on the ground change? Instead of providing fixed solutions to emergent problems, this paper argues for a flexible framework to understand security and risk, and as a result, facilitates the development of a sustained, adaptable security posture and risk balance. The first portion of the paper draws upon a broad review of the relevant research in Critical Security Studies, threat assessment, risk management, and threat modeling to offer guidance to conflict practitioners, with the aim of building an understanding of relevant threats, methods of analysis, and means of mitigation. This engagement explores broad frameworks for understanding security, risk, and threat, as well as contextualizing and situating the role of (technical) threat modeling within a conflict practitioner’s agenda. The themes of interdependent, intersectional conflict, as well as the contributions of the harm reduction framework is central to this approach. Building on these themes, this paper embraces a risk and attack-centric, proactive approach to security including a focus on threat types and attacker motives. The goal of this portion is not to tell practitioners what to protect against, but rather to teach them how to think in security terms, and in doing so, make each individual the best active architect of their own security. In the second portion of the paper, through a broad survey of contemporary academic and practitioner literature, we assess the present state of the field's readiness to mitigate insecurity and risk. This is accomplished through two pursuits: a formal review of the current academic literature and a systematic review of existing educational-training resources provided to practitioners by their employers, measured through a multi-variable qualitative coding schema. This literature review, in combination with the assessment of educational-training materials, provides a clear picture of the ‘state of the field’ in terms of both scholars and practitioners. While this paper has begun the inquiry into these key areas of danger for our field, this is not the end but rather a starting point. Beyond this investigation, this study will be continued into the future through a practitioner-focused working group made up of engaged scholars. This working group will be the first set of individuals invited to review this paper, and their engagement will help to shape and guide the next stages, as led by the Better Evidence Project. Since the Better Evidence Project is chiefly focused on providing evidence-based guidance to make peacemaking efforts more effective, facilitating the increased safety of those engaged on the ground is a necessary early step, and essential for long-term, sustained deployments.