DGSi will produce a new generation of practitioners who think differently about conflict. DGSi will create a platform for practitioners from defence, development and diplomacy, from state backgrounds, from non-state backgrounds, and from different cultures to meet and wrestle with these issues in a new way so that we create space for new ideas to emerge.

Jeroen Gunning, Executive Director of DGSi

We are actually building a much broader and deeper understanding of what human security is about in the 21st century.

Professor Anoush Ehteshami

The kind of support that we can offer must be a broadly based support. All these situations are at the end of the day political problems. What we need to see is a greater interaction of defence capability, diplomatic capability and development capability because the big hope, and I think Somalia is a great example of this, is to get upstream of the problem to try and make these countries more stable, more capable of standing on their own feet, thus seriously reducing the likelihood of them becoming failed and failing states, of terrorists taking control, of Islamists taking control, and then having to mount an expensive intervention and carry out a process of nation building under fire, which we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan is difficult. So a greater emphasis on preventing conflict, greater interaction of defence, development and diplomacy capabilities, that is the cheaper way. in both blood and financial resources, and that’s what I would be proposing. The more emphasis the government can place on the interaction of defence, development and diplomacy the better.

General The Lord Richard Dannatt, Chair DGSi Strategic Advisory Board, BBC Radio 4 interview on what support to offer Mali