Organizational Response to Emerging Threats: Lessons from NATO and the European Union’s Responses to Peacebuilding, Cyber Threats and Energy Security

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"Organizational Response to Emerging Threats" is a project that addresses three separate threat areas -- cybersecurity, peacekeeping and energy security. The data collection for cybersecurity and energy security has been completed. As of June 2019, the data collection for peacekeeping is ongoing. The project documents are organized around three topics, reflected in the filenames -- cybersecurity, peacekeeping and energy security. The overall purpose/rationale of this research project is to develop a framework that explains how different international organizations (IOs) respond to various emerging threats in international relations. These threats can vary and include cybersecurity, energy security, food security, environmental security, and others. For the purpose of our study we focus on two major variables explaining organizational response: (1) IOs’ capacity to acquire and deploy organizational assets (also referred to as asset fungibility), and; (2) IOs’ ability to make swift decisions in response to changing internal and external environments. Drawing from primary sources including interviews with NATO and EU officials, we suggest a new model explaining when organizations are better equipped at addressing cyber threats, when they have capacity to response more effectively, and what they could do to improve their organizational responses in this area. The QDR repository contains interviews with policy makers and senior bureaucrats conducted in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 in Brussels, Belgium, and the Hague, the Netherlands. These interviews have been conducted in person or over skype. Approval to conduct interviews has been granted by the University of Cincinnati's IRB (Study ID: 2018-3371).