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Political violence

This Lloyd’s report, part of its Emerging Risk report series, investigates the conditions that enable political violence contagion – outbreaks of sub-state political violence triggering similar events across the international system – and presents a practical approach that may better equip insurers to assess this emerging risk

Political violence contagion is emerging as a poorly understood but highly important dimension of political risk. Lloyd’s commissioned the Risk Advisory Group, a leading global risk management consultancy, to produce a report investigating the conditions which enable political violence to spread in this way.

The report – Political violence contagion: A framework for understanding the emergence and spread of civil unrest – is intended to stimulate further development of new approaches that could improve the identification and assessment of the ways in which outbreaks of violence can escalate into widespread “pandemics”.

The report suggests that instances of political violence contagion are becoming more frequent and the contagion effect ever more rapid and powerful. It concludes that new approaches to risk assessment are required to make sense of this increasing speed and complexity.

The report also presents a framework for a diagnostic methodology that combines quantitative analysis with guided qualitative analysis to assess the risk of political violence contagion.