Transforming Insecurity through Nonviolent Grassroots Networks

Around the world people are responding to insecurity in numerous creative ways but their actions often take place in relative isolation, with ad hoc innovation uninformed by good practice elsewhere and without academic research support or wider recognition. Their actions have great potential for scaling up, through application to the same issue more widely, to other issues and to multiple issues together. Integrating these actions into community-based voluntary nonviolent grassroots networks is crucial to scaling up as it radically increases the scope for ideas to circulate in viral, decentred, unplanned ways. Knowledge brokering - in which innovation intermediaries facilitate two-way knowledge translation, fusion and co-production between practitioners and academia - could accelerate this scaling up and increase its impact. Transformation involves qualitative change in issues, systems and social actors and activation of potential. In the research, insecurity is defined as physical danger, material need and indignity while security is safety, prosperity and dignity. The concept of dignity is absent from most thinking on security yet people often value dignity over safety and prosperity, which is why it is central to the project.

The research project
The research question is 'How can nonviolent grassroots networks transform insecurity?' Security scholars and practitioners are often willing to engage with each other but unsure of how to go about it. The project bridges that gap. The research will explore these ideas in relation to three existing nonviolent grassroots networks - neighbourhood watch to prevent suicide bomb attacks in Somalia; projects to record every casualty of armed conflict in many countries in the global South; and projects to stop the street harassment of women in the global North and South. The research will examine of how nonviolent grassroots relate to the state, global governance and all actors that use and threaten violence. It will also explore these ideas in relation to grassroots security actors which are seeking to network with each other across issue areas.

Vision, legacy and follow-on
The vision of this project is a flourishing, diversifying and synergistic ecosystem of viral networked action for nonviolent grassroots security supported by two-way strategic knowledge brokering. The research project identified here is a substantial first step in a longer-term process of identifying practices and establishing follow-on projects that can more fully realise the project's vision. Its immediate legacy will be publications, online resources and a continuing relationship with the networks and knowledge brokers engaged with through the project.

The research team
The research team is led by Dr. Eric Herring, who is Assistant Director of the Global Insecurities Centre at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on critical security studies, especially international policy on Iraq and is particularly interested in the intersection of research, policy and activism. He was specialist adviser to the Select Committee on Economic Affairs of the House of Lords for its inquiry into UK economic sanctions policy. The main research interests of Prof. Jutta Weldes are constructivist international relations theory; gender and world politics; popular culture and world politics; and everyday insecurity. Latif Ismail was nominated in 2012 as Foreign Minister of Somalia and as National Security Adviser to the President of Somalia. He is the Director of Transparency Solutions and in this role has had extensive African grassroots security field experience. He is an adviser to NATO, the EU and the UK government (especially the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Ministry of Defence). Karen Desborough was manager of the EU-funded SCOOP project on integrating socio-economic and humanities research into policy and is a University of Bristol PhD candidate.

Facilitating the development of nonviolent grassroots networks (NGNs) and supporting them through knowledge brokering - the focus of this research - is a new approach to security policy. Existing security practice generally assumes that non-state actors and hyperconnectivity pose threats (e.g, terrorism), neglecting the ways in which non-state actors increasingly address insecurity positively and non-violently through hyperconnectivity. This project has a high degree of user demand and involvement. We have direct participation from the new democratically-elected Somali government. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud, who has a scholarly and practitioner background in grassroots peacebuilding, has been briefed personally about the project by a research team member and is strongly supportive. We have enthusiastic support from the NGNs we aim to support in counter-terrorism, casualty recording and ending sexual harassment (see Case for Support, Data Collection).

The research aims to understand how NGNs can transform insecurity through viral and strategic, and specifically knowledge brokered, innovation. That is, this research is directly about understanding and enhancing impact and pathways to it. We aim to transform the work of security practitioners and the outcomes they seek; transform the processes by which they pursue those outcomes; transform the understanding of who is a security practitioner; and transform related subjectivities. This is a radical change from top-down state-centric and militarised security practices; it starts, and looks at the world, from the perspective of bottom-across nonviolent actors and networks.

Central to this project is conceptualising risk, cost and insecurity in relation to dignity, safety and prosperity. We have been struck by the prominence of dignity in motivating NGN practices, including a willingness to accept risks and costs to safety and prosperity in the pursuit of dignity. Our research directly aims to assist NGN volunteers to optimise their mix of dignity, safety and prosperity on their own terms; to find ways of maximising the extent to which dignity, safety and prosperity can be mutually reinforcing rather than traded off; and to identify counter-productive actions so that harms can be avoided. This research would therefore also be of direct use to third-sector organisations and, in the long run, to the general public.

Preventing suicide bomb attacks: our research will reinforce and increase the positive outcomes already achieved by the neighbourhood watch approach - fewer suicide bomb attacks, arrests of potential suicide bombers, and locating caches of bomb materials and weapons - without death, injury or trauma among volunteers. We will identify practices that avoid harms, such as attackers switching to more destructive options like large car bombs or displacing attacks to areas without neighbourhood watch. Stopping street harassment: The research will enhance global efforts to reduce street harassment, including identifying successful tactics and enhanced understanding of the nature and extent of direct and indirect risks/costs to volunteers so that those risks/costs can be minimised or avoided. Casualty recording: Our research will study the globalisation of casualty recording and the forms of knowledge brokering among casualty recording groups, which, in addition to providing comfort and dignity to survivors, generate records that can be used as evidence in war crimes tribunals. We aim to develop an approach to knowledge brokering among NGNs with wide-ranging, new and surprising applications, e.g., we are interested in developing ideas such as grassroots networked arms control to provide the end-use and end-user arms trade monitoring that states have neglected or actively avoided. (For academic beneficiaries/benefits, see Academic Beneficiaries. For more information on non-academic beneficiaries/benefits, see Pathways to Impact.)