How This Work Is Informed
Security work is often framed around response—what to do when harm is imminent or already underway. CompreSec begins earlier.
This work is grounded in interdisciplinary research and practice addressing violence, escalation, and prevention at multiple levels: interpersonal, institutional, and systemic. It draws from threat assessment, domestic violence prevention, systems dynamics, mental health, ethics, and nonviolent strategy to understand how harm emerges—and how it can often be avoided.
Across these domains, a consistent pattern appears:
Violence is rarely sudden. It is more often preceded by recognizable signals, accumulating stress, boundary erosion, and missed opportunities for early intervention.
The influences below reflect how CompreSec approaches security as a capacity to be cultivated over time, rather than a posture adopted in crisis. They are offered not as a canon, but as a transparent account of ideas and practices that shape this work.
Violence, Threat Assessment, and Early Warning
Gavin de Becker
The Gift of Fear; Just 2 Seconds
De Becker’s work foregrounds the importance of intuition, pre-incident indicators, and boundary-setting. His emphasis on recognizing early warning signs—rather than dismissing them as overreaction—has deeply shaped modern approaches to personal and executive protection.
Key contribution:
Violence is rarely unpredictable; it is often preceded by signals that can be recognized and acted upon.
Force Science Institute
Applied research on human performance under stress
Force Science research examines how perception, cognition, and physiology change in high-stress situations. This body of work helps explain why well-intended responses can inadvertently escalate harm when human limitations are ignored.
Key contribution:
Understanding stress responses is essential to designing realistic, humane safety strategies.
The Azar–Dickens Matrix
Threat assessment and de-escalation framework
This framework offers a structured way to assess intent, capability, emotional state, and opportunity, helping practitioners distinguish between posturing, grievance, and imminent risk.
Key contribution:
Not all threats are equal; discernment prevents both overreaction and neglect.
J. Reid Meloy
Violence Risk and Threat Assessment
Meloy’s work provides a rigorous, behaviorally grounded framework for assessing the risk of targeted violence. Rather than relying on profiling or prediction, this approach emphasizes observable behaviors, grievance development, fixation, leakage, and pathways toward action.
Central to Meloy’s contribution is the understanding that threat assessment is not about forecasting violence, but about evaluating risk dynamically and intervening early to disrupt escalation.
Key contribution:
Violence risk is best understood through behavior and trajectory, not labels or assumptions—allowing for earlier, more ethical intervention.
William C. Coursen
The Safety Trap
Coursen’s The Safety Trap examines how well-intentioned security measures can inadvertently increase risk by creating complacency, rigidity, or misplaced confidence. Rather than assuming that added security automatically improves safety, Coursen highlights how organizations can become trapped by procedures that no longer match evolving threats.
The book is particularly valuable for understanding organizational blind spots, where reliance on checklists or static controls substitutes for ongoing awareness and adaptive judgment.
Key contribution:
Security measures that reduce awareness can increase risk; safety depends on vigilance, adaptability, and human judgment.
Dan Schilling
The Power of Awareness
Dan Schilling’s work emphasizes situational awareness as an active, cultivated capacity, rather than a passive state. The Power of Awareness focuses on how attention, perception, and decision-making interact under uncertainty, and how awareness degrades when people rely too heavily on assumptions, routines, or perceived safety.
Rather than promoting hypervigilance, Schilling underscores the role of calm, informed attention in recognizing emerging risk early—before situations escalate or harden into crises.
Key contribution:
Sustained awareness enables earlier, less intrusive intervention and reduces the need for reactive force.
Rory Miller
Facing Violence; Scaling Force; Conflict Communication
Rory Miller’s work distinguishes between different categories of violence—including social, asocial, and predatory forms—and examines how misreading these distinctions leads to ineffective or dangerous responses.
In Facing Violence, Miller challenges romanticized and media-driven narratives about violence, emphasizing realism, avoidance, and early recognition. Scaling Force focuses on calibration—how responses that are too little or too much can both escalate harm. Across his writing and teaching on conflict communication, Miller highlights the role of language, posture, and boundary-setting in preventing situations from hardening into violence.
Taken together, this body of work underscores that many violent outcomes result not from inevitability, but from misinterpretation, poor communication, and escalation errors.
Key contribution:
Different types of violence require different responses; accurate classification and communication are central to preventing unnecessary escalation.
Marc “Animal” MacYoung
In the Name of Self-Defense; Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons
Across dozens of books and essays, Marc “Animal” MacYoung has focused on demystifying everyday violence and dismantling fear-driven self-defense myths. His writing consistently emphasizes context, avoidance, social dynamics, and realistic appraisal over fantasy scenarios or heroic narratives.
Two of his best-known works, In the Name of Self-Defense and Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons, challenge common misconceptions about how violence actually unfolds—particularly the tendency to overestimate rare extremes while underestimating mundane, situational risks.
MacYoung’s broader body of work reinforces the idea that most violence is socially patterned, opportunistic, and shaped by environment, and that misunderstanding these patterns often leads to unnecessary escalation or misplaced preparation.
Key contribution:
Clear-eyed understanding of everyday violence reduces fear and distortion, supporting avoidance, restraint, and more effective prevention.
Gershon Ben Keren
Krav Maga: Extreme Survival
Ben Keren’s work examines worst-case, high-consequence violence while explicitly situating it within broader cycles of escalation, degradation, and breakdown. Unlike most self-defense texts, this work does not treat violence as an isolated encounter, but as part of a larger progression shaped by stress, scarcity, group dynamics, and moral injury.
While the book includes tactical material, its deeper value lies in clarifying how extreme violence emerges—and why it remains rare, even under deteriorating conditions.
Key contribution:
Understanding the full cycle of violence clarifies when restraint is possible, when intervention matters, and when situations have truly crossed into the extreme.
Systems Dynamics, Early Warning, and Tipping Points
Violence and instability do not emerge only from individual intent or isolated incidents. They also arise from systems under strain—social, economic, institutional, and environmental systems that accumulate stress over time, normalize warning signs, and reach tipping points before corrective action becomes possible.
A systems lens helps explain why early signals are often visible yet ignored, why interventions applied too late tend to fail, and why prevention depends on recognizing patterns long before crisis conditions are obvious.
Donella Meadows
Thinking in Systems
Meadows’ work provides a foundational framework for understanding how complex systems behave. She emphasizes feedback loops, delays, leverage points, and unintended consequences—elements that explain why well-meaning interventions can sometimes worsen outcomes.
Her work is especially influential in clarifying how systems can appear stable even as underlying pressures intensify, and why late-stage responses often lack the leverage needed to prevent collapse or escalation.
Key contribution:
By the time harm is obvious, systems are often already overloaded; prevention depends on acting earlier and at the right leverage points.
The Climate Change Playbook
(Systems dynamics through participatory learning)
The Climate Change Playbook translates core systems concepts into hands-on games and simulations that make abstract dynamics immediately legible. Through participatory exercises, it illustrates feedback loops, delayed effects, tipping points, and the normalization of risk in ways that are accessible to non-specialists.
This approach clarifies a central insight for CompreSec’s work: systems often give warnings long before they fail, but those warnings are easy to miss when change is gradual, incentives are misaligned, or responsibility is diffuse.
The same dynamics that govern climate systems—delay, denial, adaptation to deteriorating conditions—also appear in escalating interpersonal violence, institutional breakdown, and democratic erosion.
Key contribution:
Accessible systems literacy makes early warning visible and actionable before crises harden.
Climate Risk, Disaster Studies, and the Normalization of Danger
(Cross-disciplinary influence)
Research and practice in climate risk and disaster response highlight how communities and institutions adapt to worsening conditions without recognizing them as emergencies. This process—often described as the normalization of danger—helps explain why societies tolerate increasing risk until thresholds are crossed.
This lens is particularly relevant to violence prevention, where gradual erosion of norms, safeguards, and trust can make extreme outcomes appear sudden, even though they were structurally prepared over time.
Key contribution:
Gradual deterioration obscures risk; systems literacy helps counter false normalcy and delayed response.
Structural Stress, Scarcity, and Collective Violence
Violence does not arise only from individual pathology or isolated incidents. It is often shaped by structural stressors—including economic disruption, rapid urbanization, inequality, and weakened institutions—that alter social norms, trust, and behavior over time.
Understanding these pressures is essential for recognizing early signals of destabilization and for avoiding overreaction when systems are strained but not yet broken.
David Kilcullen
Out of the Mountains
Kilcullen’s work examines how conflict increasingly emerges from urban density, economic marginalization, demographic pressure, and governance failures, rather than from traditional battlefields or ideological movements alone.
Rather than focusing on violence as an endpoint, Out of the Mountains helps clarify how fragmentation, grievance, and loss of legitimacy create environments in which violence becomes more likely—and harder to contain.
Key contribution:
Violence often reflects structural stress and institutional breakdown long before it appears as organized conflict.
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre
The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse
Drawing on lived experience during Argentina’s economic collapse, Aguirre offers a grounded account of how scarcity, inflation, and institutional failure reshape daily life, social trust, and personal safety.
Unlike speculative survival literature, Aguirre’s work emphasizes adaptation, community awareness, and practical restraint, highlighting how most people navigate collapse through adjustment rather than chaos.
Key contribution:
Economic collapse changes social behavior and risk patterns, but it does not automatically produce widespread violence.
Recognizing how structural stress alters behavior underscores the importance of restraint, legitimacy, and nonviolent strategies when societies are under pressure.
Nonviolence, Power, and Escalation Prevention
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan
Why Civil Resistance Works
Chenoweth and Stephan’s empirical research demonstrates that nonviolent movements are often more effective than violent ones in achieving durable political change, particularly when participation thresholds are low and legitimacy is preserved.
Their work reframes nonviolence not as moral idealism, but as strategic restraint grounded in evidence.
Key contribution:
Avoiding violence can be a powerful security strategy, not a naïve one.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
How Democracies Die
Levitsky and Ziblatt examine how democratic systems erode not primarily through sudden collapse, but through gradual norm erosion, polarization, and the normalization of institutional boundary-crossing.
Their work underscores how violence and repression often become thinkable only after guardrails have weakened and mutual restraint has been abandoned.
Key contribution:
Democratic breakdown is usually incremental; preventing escalation depends on protecting norms long before formal crises emerge.
Srdja Popović
Blueprint for Revolution
Popović’s work draws on decades of experience in nonviolent movements to show how ordinary people can resist oppression, de-escalate conflict, and protect legitimacy without resorting to violence. Rather than focusing on heroic leaders or mass confrontation, Blueprint for Revolution emphasizes humor, creativity, participation, and strategic restraint.
What distinguishes this work is its attention to practical tactics that reduce fear, broaden participation, and avoid triggering violent backlash—making nonviolence actionable for people without formal power.
Key contribution:
Concrete, nonviolent actions can disrupt escalation while preserving legitimacy and human dignity.
Interpersonal Violence, Mental Health, and Moral Injury
Understanding violence—and preventing it—requires attention not only to external threats, but to human capacity under strain, especially in relational and institutional contexts. Chronic stress, unresolved trauma, and moral injury can narrow perception, harden narratives, and increase the risk of escalation for individuals, institutions, and communities alike.
This work is informed by approaches that treat mental health and moral repair as foundational to security, not ancillary to it.
Domestic Violence Response and Prevention
(Practice-based grounding)
Extensive experience in domestic violence advocacy, shelter work, and training informs CompreSec’s understanding of coercive control, escalation patterns, and the limits of reactive intervention.
Domestic violence work offers some of the clearest evidence that violence is rarely spontaneous, but instead emerges through recognizable patterns over time. It is often preceded by patterns of control, isolation, grievance, and boundary erosion—patterns that also appear in other forms of targeted or political violence.
Key contribution:
Violence prevention depends on recognizing patterns early and intervening before harm is normalized.
Elizabeth Stanley
Widen the Window; Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training
Stanley’s work examines how chronic stress and trauma dysregulate the nervous system, narrowing attention, impairing judgment, and reducing relational capacity. Drawing on the concept of the window of tolerance, originating in the work of Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing, her research shows how individuals outside this window tend toward hyperarousal (fight/flight, impulsivity, aggression) or hypoarousal (freeze, shutdown, disengagement).
Stanley was the first to integrate nervous system regulation practices into rigorous clinical research, demonstrating that these capacities can be trained, measured, and shown to reduce reactivity under stress.
From a violence-prevention perspective, this work clarifies that escalation is often driven not only by ideology or intent, but by physiological dysregulation. Expanding capacity under stress restores perception, restraint, and the ability to choose nonviolent or proportionate responses.
Key contribution:
Nervous system dysregulation narrows perception and choice; regulation expands judgment, restraint, and de-escalation capacity.
James Gilligan
Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
Gilligan’s clinical work reframes violence as a response to shame, humiliation, and threatened dignity, rather than innate pathology. His analysis highlights how social structures, exclusion, and moral injury can create conditions in which violence feels like the only remaining means of restoring worth or agency.
Key contribution:
Violence often emerges from threatened dignity rather than inherent aggression.
Donna Hicks
Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict
Hicks’ dignity framework provides a practical lens for understanding how violations of dignity escalate conflict, and how dignity-based responses can interrupt cycles of harm. Her work bridges ethics, psychology, and conflict resolution, offering concrete ways to restore relationship and legitimacy without coercion.
Key contribution:
Protecting dignity is central to preventing escalation and repairing harm.
Family Systems Theory
Resilient Leadership 2.0; Bowen-influenced family systems work
Family Systems Theory examines how anxiety moves through relational systems, not only individuals, shaping behavior, decision-making, and group dynamics. Under stress, systems tend toward predictable patterns such as fusion (loss of differentiation), emotional cutoffs, and emotional reactivity, all of which increase rigidity and reduce discernment.
Applied to leadership and organizational contexts, as in the book Resilient Leadership 2.0, this framework helps explain how unregulated system-level anxiety can normalize coercion, moral certainty, and escalation, even among well-intentioned actors.
In contrast, healthier systems are characterized by regulated leadership, calm connection, and clear boundaries—conditions that preserve judgment, responsibility, and the capacity for restraint under pressure.
Key contribution:
Anxious systems amplify emotional reactivity and groupthink; regulated connection supports discernment, responsibility, and nonviolent action.
Moral Injury and Care for Responders
(Practice-based grounding)
Experience in domestic violence response, security work, and clinical chaplaincy highlights the impact of moral injury on victims, responders, leaders, and communities. When people are forced to act against deeply held values—or witness harm they cannot prevent—unaddressed moral injury can lead to withdrawal, rigidity, or escalation.
Attending to moral injury is therefore not a matter of individual wellness alone, but a collective security concern.
Key contribution:
Unaddressed moral injury narrows moral imagination; care and repair support restraint, judgment, and prevention.
A Note on Application
The perspectives gathered here are not treated as abstract theory. They are translated into practical, context-sensitive strategies for individuals, organizations, and communities navigating uncertainty, threat, or strain.
Taken together, they support an understanding of security that emphasizes:
- Early recognition over late reaction
- Discernment over assumption
- Restraint over escalation
- Dignity over domination
This grounding reflects a view of security as something cultivated upstream—through awareness, capacity, and care—long before choices narrow or harm appears inevitable.
CompreSec’s work lives in that upstream space: helping people see more clearly, respond more wisely, and reduce the likelihood that violence becomes the only option left.