It's time to rethink our approach to security.
As governments attempt to improve national security, global military spending has reached $2.7 trillion. Yet, by almost every other measure, insecurity is rising. This is the paradox which the Security Futures Lab exists to address.
Security is still too often framed in terms of territory, deterrence, and defence budgets. These remain necessary, but are no longer sufficient. They fail to capture the full reality of what makes societies safe and prosperous.
The threats that most shape people's lives today—climate shocks, pandemics, algorithmic disruption, biodiversity loss—are still too often treated as peripheral to security.
The result is a structural mismatch: unprecedented investment in defence alongside systemic under-preparedness for the risks defining the 21st century.
The expertise to rethink security already exists, distributed across institutions, disciplines, and regions. What is missing is the integrated framework to connect it, the political vocabulary to act on it, and the public mandate to demand it. That is what the Security Futures Lab seeks to build over the next three years.
The Challenge
Risks no longer behave in isolation. They collide, cascade, and amplify across borders.
Systemic risks collide, cascade and amplify across borders and sectors. A climate shock becomes a food crisis. A food crisis drives displacement. Displacement fuels political instability and disinformation. Institutional trust erodes at precisely the moment when response capacity is most needed. The consequences of each risk travel through systems and societies in ways that no single domain of expertise can anticipate or contain.
At the same time, insecurity is increasingly manufactured: algorithmic systems amplify fear, fragment shared reality, and undermine the informational foundations of societal resilience. What people see, hear and believe is increasingly shaped by systems designed to maximise attention, not public understanding, reducing the diplomatic and political space needed to respond to the underlying crises, often before facts can even be established.
Security today is therefore both material and epistemic. The threats are real, but so is the machinery that distorts our perception of them. The result is a world in which societies are simultaneously exposed to cascading systemic risks and increasingly unable to build the shared understanding needed to address them. No existing institutional architecture is designed to understand, let alone govern, this level of interconnected risk.
The Opportunity
Cooperation as strategic self-interest.
The risks that governments are least prepared for are already imposing measurable, concrete costs on national budgets, public health systems, and political stability.
Climate shocks displace more people annually than conflict.
COVID-19 cost the global economy approximately $12.5 trillion.
Cyber risks to critical infrastructure and informational resilience are escalating exponentially.
Disinformation and algorithmic polarisation are eroding institutional trust and social cohesion.
In each case, fragmented responses are more costly than coordinated prevention. These are not distant threats. They cannot be contained at national borders, and every nation's security is directly affected by the resilience or fragility of its neighbours.
A central part of the Lab's work is to map these interactions systematically, tracing the feedback loops through which systemic risks are amplified. By reviewing national security strategies across twenty countries and developing tools that track how risks compound across critical intersections, the Lab will give policymakers the ability to price systemic risk more accurately, reallocate capital earlier, and direct resources toward resilience before shocks escalate.
The Lab's work does not begin with a defence of multilateralism. It begins from a more compelling place: your country is exposed, and here is the architecture that strengthens its resilience.
The power of this framing is that it does not ask political leaders to choose between national interest and international cooperation. It argues they are the same thing, and makes that case on grounds that are harder to dismiss: not moral obligation, but measurable national vulnerability. When leaders have that argument available to them, backed by concrete evidence and scenarios rather than abstract appeals to solidarity, the political calculus around cooperation begins to shift.
What is distinctive?
The Lab does not duplicate existing expertise. It integrates it. Many institutions are already working on each of the relevant domains of national security—albeit mostly from particular geographic and/or geopolitical perspectives. Significant gaps remain such as the integrated framework, the political vocabulary, and the public engagement infrastructure to facilitate joined-up thinking and convert analysis into action.
Climate, technological, health and geopolitical risks analysed as one interconnected system, not separate domains.
Deploying an Inquiry-based approach with research on security strategies across five continents, and three deep dives on climate, technology and health security to generate policy-relevant insights and scenarios.
A consortium across five continents ensures the Lab is not anchored in any single geography, doctrine or security tradition and is free to articulate the link between shared risks and shared security.
Engaging citizens, markets and institutions in a whole-of-society understanding of security.
This is not the creation of yet another institution. The Lab exists at a unique moment in history when we have a chance to rethink our approach to security.
How will the Lab create change?
A three-phase model linking analysis to action
Founding partners will help shape the specific outputs across each phase, as co-architects of the Lab's direction. All outputs will be designed not to produce analysis, but to drive a fundamental change in thinking on security.
Build
Establish the global consortium, core team, governance, methodology and map key resources. Identify partner institutions across five continents, convene the Advisory Council and mobilise funding commitments for phase two and three.
Understand
Implement Inquiry programme: Map interactions across climate, technological and health security risks; synthesise state of knowledge; review national security strategies in 20+ countries and prepare integrated analysis and scenarios and policy tools for Security Futures Report.
Apply
Translate analysis into significant public and political engagement through digital platforms, media and youth programmes. Work directly with governments and constituencies to apply integrated security frameworks to national planning. Anchor continued advocacy.
Designed to catalyse five key shifts
The measure of this Lab is what changes in the world because it exists. The Lab's theory of change is built around five mutually reinforcing shifts, designed to build sequentially.
The Understanding Shift
Governments and publics develop an integrated understanding of security grounded in real vulnerabilities rather than manufactured fears—one in which climate adaptation is a security investment and algorithmic threats are treated with the same rigour as military hardware.
The Political Shift
Political leaders gain a credible language for making the case for cooperative security to their own citizens—demonstrating that safety from climate displacement, economic disruption and AI-driven attacks depends on what happens beyond their borders. This shifts the political calculus.
The Institutional Shift
Security institutions, health ministries, environment agencies and technology regulators begin sharing threat assessments across silos—enabled by a common analytical framework that allows a government facing a climate shock to understand its other implications simultaneously.
The Resource Shift
Security budgets begin to include systemic resilience investments alongside conventional defence spending. Climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness and algorithmic governance are under-resourced not because they are unimportant, but because they lack the security framing that unlocks political will. The Lab provides that framing.
The Agency Shift
Citizens—particularly young people and communities across the Global South—gain the literacy and confidence to understand the threats they actually face and demand strategies that address them. In a world where fear is manufactured and vulnerability is exploited, the ability to tell the difference is not a soft outcome. It is a security outcome.
What will the Lab look like?
Geopolitical independence at our core
A Global Consortium
- The Lab operates through a consortium of 6-8 core partners across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
- Partners are co-creators, and contributors—shaping the inquiry, validating scenarios, and hosting public engagement in their regions.
- Regional anchoring ensures the analysis reflects lived geopolitical realities, not imported frameworks. Outputs are globally relevant but not geopolitically aligned.
Oxford Martin School Hub
The Lab will operate with a hub, hosted at the Oxford Martin School and composed of a team of thematic and operational experts. It will lead the design, coordinate joint planning, convene global networks of institutions and support partners in delivering the approved programme of work.
Independence is structural, not aspirational: publicly disclosed funding, transparent methodologies, clear conflict-of-interest protocols, and a geographically diverse Advisory Council of twenty senior leaders.
Achim Steiner
Founding Director
Brings three decades of experience leading global institutions such as UNDP, UNEP, IUCN and WCD and a strong track record in international diplomacy in crisis contexts. He has a proven ability to convene and mediate across ideological, geopolitical, and sectoral divides—aligning actors with conflicting interests where few institutions can operate effectively—and brings to this Lab the approach that enabled those transformations.