Evolving Securities Initiative: THINKING AT THE EDGE

Evolving Securities Initiative (ESI) was created with the aim of bringing together scholars and professionals from across the globe to challenge responses to 21st century harmscapes.

ESI network of scholars and security professionals generates knowledge about existing and emerging harmscapes and associated security governance developments.  The Initiative brings together security scholars and professionals undertaking innovative research and thinking on today’s security challenges. It fosters disciplinary and cross-disciplinary work among criminologists, historians, economists, anthropologists, political theorists, sociologists, international relations scholars, natural scientists, lawyers and security professionals from the public and private sectors.

The Evolving Securities Initiative is led by the Global Risk Governance team and is supported by the University of Cape Town,  and  ProActive ReSolutions.

As 21st Century humans we live in a number of new worlds that are presenting new challenges, or what we refer to as New Harmscapes. How we humans, through our businesses and institutions respond to these will determine both the contours of the 21st Century and the very nature of our lives, along with the lives of many other species, for a long, long time. 

THE NEW PLANET: with the advent of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch caused by the Industrial Revolution and subsequent Climate Change, we’re experiencing an increased frequency and severity of catastrophic weather events, creating new and unforeseen harmscapes with implications for resilience at the individual, community, government and corporate levels.

THE NEW DIGITAL WORLD: data streams that run through the digital networks, and the algorithms that increasingly analyse these masses of data, now constitute the information armature indispensable for the functioning of complex societies, where machines and humans form new hybrid assemblages. The economic and social benefits of the Digital Revolution are accompanied by new harmscapes, new forms of delinquency and attacks against critical infrastructure. Although they appear to be totally distinct, these two transformations modify the architecture of the risks confronted by people thinking and operating at the edge.

THE NEW HUMAN: our third transformation is all about the new emerging Human Capacities, focussing on humans and their assemblages with other earthlings, what we refer to as techno-humans, whereby we physically converge with technologies and explore the new harmscapes brought about by this convergence.  

Each of these New Worlds is interdependent and in need of thinking at the edge that encourages trial and error when testing responses to the emerging harmscapes. 

ESI is a collaborative initiative between innovative thinkers, both professional and academic. Our intention is to choose from academic papers and commentaries on the three new worlds, make these available in summary form to readers, arrange small round table dialogues with academics and practitioners, draw lessons from these dialogues, implement a series of trial and error projects and offer the lessons to those professionals working to minimise and prevent current and future harms

View the website Evolving Securities Inititiatve >>>