Hi there. In the assignment you've just completed, you were asked to unravel a complex security and safety case, Hurricane Katrina. You've looked at the levels of government that were involved and the multitude of stakeholders and actors that played a role. You've also seen why Hurricane Katrina can be labeled a wicked case. So you've gotten a feel for the concepts multi-level and multi-actor that are central elements of this course. So far in this course, we've provided you with a number of concepts that enable you to view and recognize the complexity of modern-day safety and security challenges. Now, we move to the second part of this course. What can we do to unravel such challenges to come to a proper academic understanding and to find responses to such challenges or develop strategies and mechanisms to react to them? In this video, we will provide you with a three-step approach of exploring, understanding, and doing safety and security. This three-step approach can be used to unravel modern-day safety and security challenges in an academic way. And it can provide indicators to potential responses to such challenges. So what is the three-step approach that we are talking about? The three steps are explore, understand, do. Let's look at each of them in more detail. Step one consist of exploration. This means that you attempt to plot the relevant aspects of a safety and security case. For example, you create a timeline of events. What actually happened? What was the causal chain of events? But also, what is the context in which a security and safety instant arose? In which political context did it occur? In which societal context did it arise? And in which historical and geographical context did it happen? You seek to find out as much factual information about a case as possible. And you sort and plot these facts into a description of the case. Step two is about understanding a safety and security case. Safety and security incidents are studied in a variety of different academic disciplines. Each of these disciplines looks at the same safety and security issue in completely different ways. And each discipline offers us various lenses, methods, tools, and approaches to understand safety and security issues. For example, when cyber criminals hack into a computer to steal data, a computer scientist will focus on the technical aspects of such a security breach. He or she will seek to understand which technical weaknesses were exploited. And he or she will then seek to mitigate these weaknesses by changing parts of the software code or replacing hardware. A legal scholar, in contrast, looks at entirely different things. Rather than looking at the technical setup, a legal scholar will seek to understand whether or not hacking qualifies as a crime, which legal frameworks apply, whether or not the perpetrator can be apprehended, and if so, whether or not he or she can be prosecuted. Understanding safety and security cases means that you're able to shed light on a case, to unravel its complexities by viewing it from the perspective of multiple relevant academic disciplines. After all, each of these disciplines uses different lenses, and combined, these bring something unique to the case. They clarify specific aspects or elements of the case by combining insights from different disciplines. Therefore, you'll be able to develop a rich, detailed understanding of the case. You will learn to appreciate the complexities of modern-day safety and security cases and will acquire the skill to break down these complexities into a set of distinct yet interrelated problems. Step three of the three-step approach to safety and security consists of what we call doing security. Doing security means two things. First, it means being able to integrate the information you gathered during the exploration phase with the different academic disciplines and lenses that you've gathered in step two, understanding. It's not enough to merely list different perspectives on the same case side by side. For a truly rich appreciation of the complexity of modern-day safety and security cases, we must learn to see the interlinkages between concepts, theories, and ideas from various disciplines. Integrating ideas into a comprehensive analysis provides us with a real understanding of these complex cases. Second, doing security means that we find ways to address modern-day safety and security challenges. Understanding and appreciating such challenges is one thing. But if we want to make a real contribution, we must seek to find means and mechanisms to tackle them. Doing security involves both assessing how actors address the security challenge at hand and developing new and improved governance responses to them. It means thinking through strategies and practices that can be used to reduce risks to societally acceptable levels. In the next module, you will see how we use the three-step approach to unravel three complex safety and security cases, the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in the year 2000, the Boston bombing in 2013, and the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984. For each case, we will first explore what happened by listing the facts, making a timeline, and sketching the context. Then we will provide you with an understanding of the case by discussing different lenses from academic disciplines on the causes and effects of the case. And finally, we will provide you with pointers on how the risk of a similar case arising can be, and has been, reduced afterwards by discussing changes in, for instance, policies or organizational aspects. Make sure you study these cases carefully. After these three examples, you'll be asked to use the three-step approach yourself on a real-world safety or security case. See you in the next module.
