This article defines and briefly explains the various names and labels given to activities and practices anticipating or foreseeing the future. Indeed, from risk management to Strategic Foresight and Warning (SF&W) the field of anticipation includes many perspectives and practices centred on different themes. Meanwhile, various actors use different names for SF&W, or very similar approaches. It is thus important to clarify what various labels and names mean, even if borders between categories are often fuzzy.
Tag Archives: risk
Evaluating Likelihoods for Libya – Scenario 2 Partition
Image: United Nations Photo, [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via FlickrWe shall now discuss the organization, indicators, and likelihood of the various partition scenarios, after having detailed the indicators and determined the likelihood for intervention in the last article.Note: In the following article, we shall use the acronym COR for the Council of Representatives (nationalists), GNC for the General National Congress (Islamists), and GNA for the UN-backed Government of National Accord (unity government).Organizing the Scenarios and IndicatorsConsidering that external actors are already intervening in Libya, as we saw previously, as well as the fact that surrounding countries are experiencing migrant, smuggling, and jihadist spillover from Libya’s civil war, we organized the parent scenarios to account for these certainties. The next branch of …
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Evaluating Likelihoods for Libya – Scenario 2 Methodology
In this article and the next, we shall evaluate the likelihood of the primary scenarios for foreign military intervention, which we started to detail in “Scenarios for the Future of Libya – Scenario 2: The Joint Arab Force Takes a Side (1).” We shall focus on preliminary methodological work allowing for better describing the intervention cases for likelihood estimates. In the last article we discussed the likelihood of Scenario 1, where the Libyan actors negotiate a peace settlement—a scenario for which the probability we assessed was less than 20%, or highly unlikely. As detailed previously, we shall use the methodology developed by The Red (Team) Analysis Society, building upon Heuer (“Assessing Probability of a Scenario”, in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, …
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Geopolitics, Uncertainties and Business (6) : The Psychological Impact of the Islamic State Terrorist Attacks
This article is the second of a two-parts of a series seeking to identify the impacts of the current and most probably forthcoming terrorist attacks by the Islamic State and other jihadist groups, and focuses on major socio-psychological consequences. It follows a first article, which started outlining a framework for impact assessment out of our current understanding of the economic consequences of terrorism, which notably pointed out the need to use mapping as methodology if the complex and cascading characters of these impacts are to be properly assessed. The larger aim of the series is notably to understand if businesses should or not neglect these aggressions and related geopolitical uncertainties, while finding out ways to foresee these risks so as to best design answers (see Helene Lavoix, “Businesses and Geopolitics: Caught up in the Whirlwinds? (1)”, The Red (Team) Analysis Society, 17 Oct 2016)
To find out which could be the psychological impacts of the ongoing string of terrorist attacks, we
Businesses and Geopolitics (1): Caught up in the Whirlwinds?
What if, by May 2017, “non-liberal” movements and parties were in power in the U.S. with Donald Trump, France with Marine Le Pen and Austria with Norbert Hofer? The overall geopolitical configuration would most probably greatly change, in areas such as the tensions between “the West” and Russia, the upheavals between the U.S. and Eastern Asia, the European Union’s definition, policies and …
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Behind-the-Scenes
Summer-Autumn 2016
The summer and early autumn have been particularly interesting times for the Red (Team) Analysis Society. We notably participated in crucial “behind-the-scenes” meetings and activities, which shape how the field of risk management, strategic foresight and warning, crisis prevention or more broadly strategic anticipation evolves, from practice, processes, and methodologies, to major issues, specific risks and uncertainties. About global risks, threats and uncertainties, …
Scenarios for the Future of Libya – Sc 2.4 Partition and Spill Over
Featured image: United Nations Photo, [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via FlickrIn our previous article, we detailed a partition scenario where Libya splits into independent states along tribal and provincial lines, as well as a north-south axis, and in the one before, we focused on various possible spill over. This article focuses on a combination of the two cases, partition and spill over scenarios. In the first scenario, the Amazigh, Tuareg, and Toubou tribes outright declare independence and break away from the Libyan state, which leads to significant spill over in Algeria, Niger, and Chad. In the second scenario, Libya is partitioned along provincial lines, which leads to spill over in all directions. In the last scenario, Libya splits apart along a …
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Alberta Mega Wildfire and the United Arab Emirates Security
In April 2016, some important oil-producing Middle Eastern countries, as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iran, were present among the representatives of more than 155 countries headed to the U.N. in New York to ratify the international climate accord negotiated during the Paris COP 21 (“UAE vows to make climate deal work”, The National UAE, April 23, 2016). Less than a month later, from North America to Russia, places especially vulnerable to climate change are shaken by immense wildfires. Prominent among these extreme weather events, is the mega wildfire that devastates the region of Fort Mc Murray, in the Alberta state of Canada (Bryan Alary, “Fort Mc Murray blaze among “most extreme” of wild fires says researcher”, Phys.org, May …
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Seminars in Brussels: 2013-2020
In 2013, Vesalius College, the Institute for European Studies (IES) and the Global Governance Institute (GGI) created an Advanced Certificate in Global Risk Analysis & Crisis Management that included 10 modules. The Red Team took an active part in the curriculum design of the first part “Risk Analysis and Early Warning” at the start of …
How to Analyze Future Security Threats (3): Scenarios as an Organic Living System
This article is the third of a series looking for a methodology that would fulfill the challenging criteria demanded by our time. We shall now focus on scenarios, which are a way to simulate how the actors we defined and described during the previous step interact, not only among themselves but also with their environment, up until the end of the chosen timeframe. Using the precedent post’s game of chess analogy, with scenarios we imagine the various ways the game may “end”.Towards an Operational Methodology to Analyse Future Security Threats and Political Risk (1)Methodology to Analyse Future Security Threats (2): a Game of ChessHow to Analyse Future Security Threats (3): Scenarios as an Organic Living SystemHow to Analyse Future Security Threats (4): Scenarios and …
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