I'm hoping to spark practical ideas for promoting security at the community level, regardless of state budget upheaval and cuts to public services. Community resilience comes down to finding local solutions while drawing on global networks for ideas, inspiration, tools, and 'how-to'. What can we do in our neighborhoods to take care of each other when it comes to physical security?

Here's the article I started using a Harry Potter analogy, "Dumbledore's Army", on MiiU.org.

Dumbledore's Army

Description

A practical mashup of neighborhood watch + American colonial minutemen/British Home Guard + 4th Generation Warfare + John Robb’s insights re: Global Guerrillas, all in the context of community resilience.

This tongue-in-cheek riff on themes from a wildly popular children’s series is built around an accessible (and fictional) analogy in order to generate a seriously light-hearted discussion about community-level security. Please add your comments and instructive examples of what has worked or is working.

Dumbledore’s Army (see Wikipedia’s description) is taken from J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series. It’s a group of students who are disturbed by a trend toward paranoid tyranny and ham-fisted stupidity by the wizarding government on the one hand, and a rising tide of deadly violence on the other. The majority of grownups don’t admit the problem, lacking understanding of the times and lacking the courage to resist either government over-reach or the insurgent warlord and his thugs. Realizing that they are being fed lies and that the authorities can not actually protect them, the students voluntarily train themselves for self-defense.

They take the name Dumbledore’s Army in honor of their beloved (but politically incorrect) headmaster who is held in suspicion by the inept and heavy-handed wizarding government. Successive government administrations deny the threat posed by the insurgent warlord, initially dismissing the growing violence as random crime and lawlessness, and later blaming the Dumbledore-inspired counter-insurgency, a group calling itself The Order of the Phoenix.

External Links

John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog

William S. Lind on 4th Generation Warfare

Home Guard on Wikipedia

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