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Managers have traditionally concentrated on the offensive aspects of strategic planning. With a few important exceptions, the strategic planning literature is also heavily weighted toward offensive considerations. Yet two fields to which business is frequently compared, the military and sports, often give defensive considerations as much emphasis as offensive ones. The purpose of this article is to stress the importance of defensive considerations in strategic planning. A risk‐threat matrix is developed which managers can use as a guide to formulating defensive strategies to counter the full range of potentially detrimental situations their firms may face.

At the substantive level, there exists a gap in knowledge about the position of security risk management (i.e. SRM) during the terminals’ operations and management; particularly when there is potential for deliberate anti-security acts. Correspondingly, the purpose of this paper is a need for more practical research to find out the justification for the existence of the SRM and different techniques for its appropriate execution on these logistics infrastructures principally with due regard to the potential requirements in the near future.

Both qualitative and quantitative techniques are used in this study incorporating fuzzy set theory and risk assessment matrix to achieve the research objective.

A designed SRM framework tailored for Qalhat liquefied petroleum gas (LNG) terminal in Sultanate of Oman was established to manage the security threats which can be resulted from any probable terrorist attacks.

The limited numbers of experts for the purpose of the addressed SRM are causing challenges in data collection.

The pressures for enhanced attention to critical infrastructure security have fostered new challenges for petrochemical seaports and terminals (PSTs). These tendencies dictate to maintain comprehensive security regimens that can be integrated with national and international strategies to support the country’s security against terrorism.

The development of the security risk factor table model in the case of Qalhat LNG Terminal.

The Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (NSI) is the focal point of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE), a radical reformulation of policies governing government intelligence activities within US borders. In the wake of the September 11th attacks, long-standing informational norms for the production, use, and circulation of domestic intelligence records containing personal information are being replaced with far less restrictive norms, altering a status quo that had been in effect since mid-1970s. Although the NSI represents an unprecedented expansion of human resources dedicated to the collection and production of domestic intelligence, it is not well known in privacy advocacy community. This chapter considers these and other terms in the context of relevant US law and policy, including the Privacy Act of 1974, the E-Government Act of 2002, Executive Order 12333, and 28 CFR Part 23. In addition to describing the federal (ISE-SAR) standard, the chapter examines the critical role of guidance in the logic of suspicious activity report (SAR) production, and the problematic role finished ISE-SARs seem to play in the matrix of federal and state-level watch lists. The program, if not properly regulated, could pose a considerable threat to personal privacy and the life chances and self-determination of all US persons. The chapter considers this threat in terms of Nissenbaum's (2010) “contextual integrity,” a theory of context-relative informational norms.

As of January 1, 2020, the upper limit of sulfur emissions outside emission control areas decreased from 3.5% to 0.5%. This paper aims to present some of the challenges associated with the implementation of the sulfur cap and investigates its possible side effects as regard the drive of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Even though it would appear that the two issues (desulfurization and decarbonization) are unrelated, it turns out that there are important cross-linkages between them, which have not been examined, at least by the regulators.

A literature review and a qualitative risk assessment of possible CO₂ contributors are presented first. A cost-benefit analysis is then conducted on a specific case study, so as to assess the financial, as well as the environmental impact of two main compliance choices, in terms of CO₂ and sulfur oxide.

From a financial perspective, the choice of a scrubber ranks better comparing to a marine gas oil (MGO) choice because of the price difference between MGO and heavy fuel oil. However, and under different price scenarios, the scrubber choice remains sustainable only for big vessels. It is noticed that small containerships cannot outweigh the capital cost of a scrubber investment and are more sensitive in different fuel price scenarios. From an environmental perspective, scrubber ranks better than MGO in the assessment of overall emissions.

Fuel price data in this paper was based on 2019 data. As this paper was being written, the COVID-19 pandemic created a significant upheaval in global trade flows, cargo demand and fuel prices. This made any attempt to perform even a rudimentary ex-post evaluation of the 2020 sulfur cap virtually impossible. Due to limited data, such an evaluation would be extremely difficult even under normal circumstances. This paper nevertheless made a brief analysis to investigate possible COVID-19 impacts.

The main implication is that the global sulfur cap will increase CO₂ emissions. In that sense, this should be factored in the IMO greenhouse gas discussion.

According to the knowledge of the authors, no analysis examining the impact of the 2020 sulfur cap on CO₂ emissions has yet been conducted in the scientific literature.

The study's objective is to measure the response of the food prices to the aggregate and disaggregate geopolitical risk events, Russia's geopolitical risks and global energy prices in the context of two European regions, i.e. Eastern and Western Europe covering the monthly data from January 2001 to March 2022.

The authors apply a novel and sophisticated econometric method, the cross-quantilogram (CQ) approach, to analyse the authors’ monthly data properties. This method detects the causal relationship between the variables under the bi-variate modelling approach. More importantly, the CQ procedure divulges the bearish and bullish states of the causal association between the variables under short, medium and long memories.

The authors find that aggregate measures of geopolitical risk reduce food prices in the short term in the Eastern Europe but increases food prices in the Western Europe. Besides, the decomposed measures of geopolitical risk “threats” and “acts” have heterogeneous effects on the food prices. More importantly, Russia's geopolitical risk events and global energy prices enhance the food inflation under long memory.

The authors provide diverse policy implications for Eastern and Western Europe based on the authors’ findings. First, the European policymakers should take concrete and joint policy measures to tackle the detrimental effects of geopolitical risks to bring stability to the food markets. Second, this region should emphasize utilizing their unused agricultural lands to grow more crops to avoid external dependence on food. Third, the European Union and its partners should begin global initiatives to help smallholder farmers because of their contribution to the resilience of disadvantaged, predominantly rural communities. Fourth, geopolitically affected European countries like Ukraine should deal with a crippled supply chain to safeguard their production infrastructure. Fifth, fuel (oil) scarcity in the European region due to the Russia-Ukraine war should be mitigated by searching for alternative sources (countries) for smooth food transportation for trade. Finally, as Europe and its Allies impose new sanctions in response to the Russia-Ukraine war, it can have immediate and long-run disastrous consequences on the European and the global total food systems. In this case, all European blocks mandate cultivating stratagems to safeguard food security and evade a long-run cataclysm with multitudinous geopolitical magnitudes for European countries and the rest of the world.

This is the maiden study that considers the aggregated and disaggregated measures of the geopolitical risk events, Russia's geopolitical risks and global energy prices and delves into these dynamics' effects on food prices. Notably, linking the context of the Russia-Ukraine war is a significant value addition to the existing piece of food literature.

The purpose of this paper is to address the limitations of conventional risk matrix based tools such that both positive and negative connotation of uncertainty could be captured within a unified framework that is capable of modeling the direction and strength of causal relationships across uncertainties and prioritizing project uncertainties as both threats and opportunities.

Theoretically grounded in the frameworks of Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) and interpretive structural modeling (ISM), this paper develops a structured process for assessing uncertainties in projects. The proposed process is demonstrated by a real application in the construction industry.

Project uncertainties must be prioritized on the basis of their network-wide propagation impact within a network setting of interacting threats and opportunities. Prioritization schemes neglecting interdependencies across project uncertainties might result in selecting sub-optimal strategies. Selection of strategies should focus on both identifying common cause uncertainty triggers and establishing the strength of interdependency between interconnected uncertainties.

This paper introduces a novel approach that integrates both facets of project uncertainties within a project uncertainty network so that decision makers can prioritize uncertainty factors considering the trade-off between threats and opportunities as well as their interactions. The ISM based development of the network structure helps in identifying common cause uncertainty triggers whereas the modeling of a BBN makes it possible to visualize the propagation impact of uncertainties within a network setting. Further, the proposed approach utilizes risk matrix data for project managers to be able to adopt this approach in practice. The proposed process can be used by practitioners while developing uncertainty management strategies, preparing risk management plans and formulating their contract strategy.

During the 1990s the “information age” spawned a new breed of enterprises devising business models unheard of previously. One aspect of this changing business environment has been the trend in disintermediation observed in many industries. Where many recent papers see disintermediation as a phenomenon related to online transactions, this paper defines it more broadly as the removal or a weakening of an intermediary within a supply chain. This paper attempts to explain why disintermediation of distributors/import agents often occurs at the growth phase of a product's lifecycle, highlighting possible opportunities and outcomes for distributors threatened by disintermediation. The paper uses a downturn in a company's fortune to illustrate the case and to provide a potentially generic analytical tool for small distributors that will almost inevitably face a conflict of interests with their suppliers, which leads to disintermediation pressure.

International projects very commonly experience failure due to various factors at the global level. Especially, large projects at the international level virtually have no chance of meeting scope, time, cost and quality. This fact has been underlined by most of the international surveys and published literature. Effective risk management plays a vital role in preventing projects from failure by implementing appropriate risk response strategies. The success of risk management will be based on the understanding of various risk categories which specifically affect international projects, analysis of their interdependence, prioritize them according to their importance and develop strategies for risk management based on the prioritization. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper represents typical eight risk categories frequently observed in the international projects through literature survey and feedback from project professionals. Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and Matrice d’Impacts croises-multiplication applique´ an classment (MICMAC) analysis have been used to analyze the interactions among the risk categories and prioritize them. The strategy management tool threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths (TOWS) matrix has been used to develop the strategies for effective project risk management.

The analysis represents political risks, contractual and legal risks, cultural risks, and financial and economic risks as the highest priority risk categories, the mitigation of which should be paid the highest attention. The strengths-threats strategy has been applied to develop the strategies by identifying the various internal strengths of project organization to overcome the various threats caused by the eight risk categories observed in international projects.

This paper tries to represent the prioritization of international project risk categories which are generic in nature. For any specific international project, the risk categories as well as their prioritization may be slightly varying. The tool used for prioritization; Interpretive structural modeling (ISM) is more suitable for few numbers of variables as it becomes complex as the number of variables increases. The strengths and threats considered for developing strategies using TOWS matrix are based on the feedback from project professionals and may vary according to the nature of project.

This paper uses ISM and MICMAC for risk prioritization in international projects and TOWS matrix for developing risk management strategies. This may trigger new opportunities for in-depth research in the risk management strategy development for international projects.

Building information modelling (BIM) creates a golden thread of information of the facility, which proves useful to those with the malicious intent of breaching the security of the facility. A cyber-attack incurs adverse implications for the facility and its managing organisation. Hence, this paper aims to unravel the impact of a cybersecurity breach, by developing a BIM-facilities management (FM) cybersecurity-risk-matrix to portray what a cybersecurity attack means for various working areas of FM.

This study commenced with exploring cybersecurity within various stages of a BIM project. This showcased a heightened risk of cybersecurity at the post-occupancy phase. Hence, thematic analysis of two main domains of BIM-FM and cybersecurity in the built environment led to the development of a matrix that illustrated the impact of a cybersecurity attack on a BIM-FM organisation.

Findings show that the existing approaches to the management of cybersecurity in BIM-FM are technology-dependent, resulting in an over-reliance on technology and a lack of cybersecurity awareness of aspects related to people and processes. This study sheds light on the criticality of cyber-risk at the post-occupancy phase, highlighting the FM areas which will be compromised as a result of a cyber-attack.

This study seeks to shift focus to the people and process aspects of cybersecurity in BIM-FM. Through discussing the interconnections between the physical and digital assets of a built facility, this study develops a cyber-risk matrix, which acts as a foundation for empirical investigations of the matter in future research.

Public‐private partnerships (PPPs) are being faced by risk threats, notwithstanding the fact that the PPP model has been structured in a way that the associated risks are shared by both the public and private sectors. Consequently, the sources of risk change over the PPP project phases. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify and assess the risk factors in PPP infrastructure project phases comprising development phase, construction phase, operation phase and project life cycle through an empirical approach.

The study adopted four different data-gathering approaches including literature review, desk review, brainstorming session and questionnaire survey. In order to capture a broad perception of stakeholders, the questionnaires were administered to three different stakeholder organizations to include public sector authorities (i.e. ministries, department and agencies), concessionaires and lenders/banks involved in different PPP infrastructure projects implementation in Nigeria. A total of 81 questionnaires were administered, out of which 63 were retrieved but after checking through the completed questionnaires, 60 questionnaires were found suitable for the analysis. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics, mean score, Kruskal–Wallis test and the risk significance index in terms of severity and likelihood of occurrence conducted.

In total, 70 risk factors were identified with respect to PPP project phases and their relative importance was gauged. In addition, the analysis of total 70 risk factors in the development phase, construction phase, operation phase and project life cycle phase indicated that 51 risk factors are located in the yellow zone, which is considered as moderate and 19 risk factors are located in the red zone that are regarded as critical.

The identification of specific critical risk factors in each PPP project phase will provide a benchmark in developing risk management programs in developing countries.

These study findings would be useful for PPP stakeholders to focus their attention, priorities and leadership in managing these critical risk factors. Furthermore, the findings of this study are significant in providing an in-depth understanding of the current Nigeria’s PPP market environment, which is a true reflection of developing countries as a whole.