A Culture of CBRN

Nasser bin Nasser, Managing Director of MESIS, gives his opinion to Gwyn Winfield on what is working well at the CBRN COE in the Middle East

Of all the regions around the world that need CBRN Centre of excellence it would be hard to find one where it’s more necessary than the Middle East. If the CW usage wasn’t bad enough there have been tens of wars there, involving one neighbour/faction or another, resulting in extended periods of instability and weak government further bedevilling rebuilding and capability development.

A variety of factors influenced the location of the European Commission’s CBRN Centre of Excellence (COE), but the fact that Jordan has a strong and well respected government and hasn’t been in a conflict with any neighbours since 1973 has to be significant. Nasser bin Nasser explained how it came about: “The Middle East Scientific Institute for Security (MESIS) was established in 2002. Around 2010, given Jordan's multi-dimensional role in regional security, the European Commission requested that Jordan, as a credible, reliable partner, host the regional secretariat for the Middle East. During discussions about what this regional secretariat could look like, both sides recognised that there was already an organisation working like a centre of excellence, which was MESIS, and able to host a secretariat, so there was no need to reinvent the wheel!”

The COE mission is to: “mitigate risks and strengthen an allhazards security governance in partner countries of the EU following a voluntary and demand-driven approach. Under the responsibility of CBRN national focal points and their inter-ministerial CBRN national teams, EU support is provided to implement a wide range of CBRN risk mitigation activities including needs and risk assessments, national and regional action plans, training, train the trainer modules, table top and real time (including cross-border) field exercises, in all partner countries and regional secretariats1.”

The Middle East is a compact COE, with Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, and MESIS is its home. MESIS’ mission is: “mitigating

CBRN risks in a region facing regular unrest… advocat[ing] a networked approach to foster robust partnerships and collaborations in the face of the threats of an ever-changing security landscape. MESIS believes that a deep understanding of culture is essential for developing successful approaches to reducing threats. [They] design and implement culturally-relevant, engaging, and sustainable capacity building programmes in addition to being a driver for policymaking and legislation development in areas related to CBRN risk mitigation2.”

Many of the ambitions in the above statement would be true throughout the COEs and the 61 nations involved, but the one that jumps out is culturally-relevant. MESIS isn’t interested in a tickbox exercise where individuals lecture busy people without regard for whether knowledge is actually being transferred or retained in a sustainable manner. Under its tutelage, the COE has been looking for local solutions to local problems. Nasser explained the vision further: “We do three things at a very high level. One is that we try to promote a whole of government approach in dealing with CBRN risks, because there's a tendency across our region to have an over-reliance on security institutions like hard security, military and intelligence agencies that will deal with anything that has a security dimension.

“But these hybrid threats need a whole of government approach and that's why the region struggles in countering other hybrid threats like violent extremism, or CBRN, because they require all of government in partnership. CBRN threats can be addressed with a solereliance on the guns, gates and guards approach.

“The second thing we do is try to create some regional cooperation on these threats and risks as they're cross border by nature. Our third aim is to promote what role there is for civil society, and there are very few civil society organisations working on security issues in our region. Typically, relations between authorities and civil society are complex here. So, we try to sort of promote that positive working relationship in the security sphere.

“On a more granular level that translates to helping identify what the emerging needs are in the region, so there's a two-way street between the region and the international community, as opposed to having the international community dictate to us what we need to work on. We localise and culturalise international best practices and this is probably the most important thing we do. We can't technically compete with the international community’s expertise on these risk mitigation , but by virtue of being from the region, we can design and implement sustainable solutions to some of the regional needs.

“We're increasingly offering innovative approaches to building capacity, including gamified simulation-based training. We think the PowerPoint eight hour workshop model is becoming obsolete, and we want to infuse our very traditional sector with some new thinking when it comes to capacity building and the learning sciences. We attempt to measure our impact and quality, and not just look at some of the more quantifiable metrics that policymakers are caught up with: how many workshops, participants or nationalities. We act as a driver for policy making in the region and hope to carve out a role for civil society to help shape the discussion. That's pretty much how we see our role in the region.”

When it comes to a whole of government approach it’s hard to find a better example than Covid. While it is an emerging infectious disease it gives a massive insight into how a real biological attack would look. All arms of the government from education and health through to the military and law enforcement have had to come together, first to understand the problem, and then to start orientating themselves to deal with it. There is no single approach but it is fair to say that centralised states capable of forcing different departments to work together have done better than those that have not. Likewise, it is fair to say that states that enjoy higher levels of

trust among their citizens have also faired better. Covid has worked not only as an educational tool for CBRN, but also a warning as to why some of the things that CBRN professionals have been talking about for decades are important.

Nasser agreed that it had its positives, but capturing all these lessons will be a big task. “It's a bit of a mixed bag. Covid has been a wake-up call in emphasising the need for all parts of government to work together. But what tends to happen with the way the international community engages this sector is that they prioritize and invest in hard security, focussing on bio-terrorism, even though bio-terrorism might not be a priority for the region. Investing in public health capacity on the other hand, inadvertently builds capacity to deal with weaponised viruses and bio-terrorism. That capacity building approach needs to be revisited.

“The public health system should be invested in as heavily as those parts of government that tend to get priority because they're combating terrorism, or involved in things that the international community thinks should be a priority. We mustn’t lose the positives, such as the way governments have tapped into universities, research institutions, or even the private sector for diagnostics, research and leveraging their wealth of data to make data-informed decisions.

“We're looking at governments turning to the private sector to deal with the very complex supply chains that are needed to receive and administer the vaccine to populations. We are seeing these dynamics but the question is, will we retain these lessons going forward? Are we actually ushering in a new phase with a very strong partnership between different communities of stakeholders, or is it just a one-off case in a crisis?

“Currently, governments across the region are rightly preoccupied with managing the crisis, but I do believe that some people are thinking more long-term about how we ensure these changes are sustained going forward. We can't find ourselves in another situation like this in the future and given the anthropogenic stresses we're putting on the environment, we’ll be here again soon enough. The question is whether we can build resilient and sufficiently adaptive systems, to be in a better position to deal with the next crisis when, rather than if, it happens.”

One of the big challenges for the international community will be in looking at countries that did well during Covid and trying to see what will work elsewhere. The stance that Vietnam took, for example, cannot just be transplanted to France. For a centre focussed on culturallyrelevant solutions it will be interesting to see which out of the huge palette of options MESIS and its partners select, as the ones that might fit for future response. Nasser explained what he meant by culturally-relevant. “Every country, region, even an organisation has its unique values, national psyche, organisational culture that dictates its behaviour, action, performance within the system that it’s operating. If we look at the corporate sector, why did VW lie about emissions tests a few years ago? What was it about the organisational culture of the system it operated in that allowed for that? Or Boeing with the 737 Max crashes, what is it

Mesis has been working on radiation training ©MESIS

about that organisational culture that prevents it from taking responsibility over this? After years of accumulated neglect, Covid is an excellent example of how countries are responding. When we talk about culture, we're not talking about cultural tourism, or being able to greet someone in their native language, but understanding the deep rooted factors that shape success.

“Working in our sphere, there's a tendency for organisations and subject matter experts from outside the region to parachute in solutions and implement topdown approaches that lack the foundation blocks for success. You need to develop programmes that reflect local priorities and attitudes, but also the administrative realities, which will be key to their eventual acceptance and success. I'm very skeptical about a contractor model where you fly in experts to magically solve the problem in a week. For example, there's a rush towards among the international community to want to get our region to develop strategies or legislation to address particular issues. That takes up so much time and effort, but most of the time those strategies end up collecting dust on the officials’ shelves because they're unimplementable. As an organization, we prefer instead to look at how we can build that bottom-up approach. I'll give you a few specific examples.

“There's a big interest in nuclear forensics, because it's topical. Everybody's interested in forensics and there's lots of funding. But you can't do forensics without proper quality control in your labs and any investment in forensics is misplaced unless there’s prior investment in the underlying foundational blocks. Another example is that my organisation does a lot of Arabic language text development for the IAEA and we develop the Arabic best practice guidelines for the World Institute for Nuclear Security (WINS). That's not because there's any shortage of Arabic language translators in Vienna, but because both organisations realise that there's a big difference between the literal translation of something and indigenising it. That's what we do. We work a lot on trustworthiness. Trustworthiness, and human reliability require such a delicate cultural approach that I don't think anybody from outside the given region can meaningfully inform this issue.”

There’s concern that Covid will loom so large that itcould obscure any other threats. The job of the COEs is to focus on the mediumto-longer term risk as they relate to their specific regions, rather than what the rest of the world might be fixated on. At some point the COE will have to work with its partner nations and set its risk priorities for the next three to five years, when Covid is reduced to innumerable Powerpoints! Does Nasser have any idea what they might be?

“If I could really effectively tell what could happen in the next three to five years in my region, I'd be a very wealthy man! We can't find ourselves in another situation like this in the coming years and given the anthropogenic stresses that we're putting on the environment, we're probably going to be there before long. The question is, is whether we're able to build resilient and responsive systems to be in a better position to deal with the next crisis when it happens. From my personal perspective, some of the biggest threats including cyber risks which have been made more pronounced by rapid digitization caused by Covid. Likewise, there are continued threats posed by ungoverned spaces and their relation with non-state actors, whether criminal or terrorist. Increasingly blurred lines between terrorists and criminal organisations is also something to be concerned about. In the most immediate term, the biggest priority across the globe will be dealing with the repercussions of Covid, namely the socioeconomic damage it has created and potential that it could lead to social unrest.”

1 https://europa.eu/cbrn-risk-mitigation/index_en 2 http://mesis.jo/about