About us

About us

The European Interagency Security Forum is a network of humanitarian organisations that cooperate on the security of their staff and operations. This site is its public information resource.

What the network does

Agencies that work in the same difficult places face the same problems, and most of them solve those problems privately. The forum exists so that they do not have to. Members pool what they have learned about how incidents happen, what makes staff safer, and how to run a security function inside an organisation that is not a security company.

Concretely, that means four kinds of work:

• Research. Studies on subjects that no single agency can resource alone, from the security of staff with diverse profiles to the real cost of managing risk.
• Guidance. Practical documents written to be adapted by an organisation of any size, from a toolkit for country offices to a short guide for NGOs without a dedicated security function.
• Incident learning. A shared approach to recording and classifying incidents so that patterns are visible across agencies and not only within one.
• Standards and advocacy. Work on duty of care, on the responsibilities of employers, and on the obligations of the states and institutions that fund humanitarian work.

Who it is for

The material is written for the people who make decisions that determine how much risk a colleague carries: country directors, security focal points, human resources and legal staff, and programme managers. It assumes no security background and no specialist vocabulary.

It is also read outside the sector. Researchers, insurers, legal advisers and donors use the collection because it is one of the few places where the operational reality of humanitarian security is set out in the open.

How the site is organised

• Library: guidance and research, grouped by subject, each item summarised on its own page.
• News: shorter commentary and notes on developments.
• Themes: subjects that cut across the collection and are held together in one place.
• Resources library: a single index of every document published here.
• Vacancies and opportunities: posts and consultancy opportunities.

Material published under an earlier version of this site remains reachable at its original address. Where a record has been superseded, the page that supersedes it says so and links to the replacement.

Secretariat

The forum is served by a small secretariat that coordinates the research programme, maintains this site, and acts as the point of contact for member agencies and for the institutions that fund the work. Details are on the secretariat page.