Transforming Insecurities 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; integrating these actions into community-based, voluntary, nonviolent, grassroots networks is crucial as it radically increases the scope for ideas to circulate. Knowledge brokering – in which intermediaries facilitate two-way knowledge translation and co-production between practitioners and academia - could accelerate this scaling up and increase its impact. The Transforming Insecurity project’s vision is of an ecosystem of viral networked action for nonviolent grassroots security supported by two-way strategic knowledge brokering.

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 sexual harassment of women in the street in the global North and South.

The project is located in the Global Insecurities Centre of the University’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies.