WASHINGTON, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- A State Department panel working with U.S. firms abroad has listed the top security challenges they faced in 2006, and called for resilience.
The Overseas Security Advisory Council issued its first annual analysis of what it called "overseas security trends for the U.S. private sector" in 2006 this week.
Although the list of threats is predictable, ranging from terrorism to corruption, intellectual property crime and natural disasters, the council's Executive Director Douglas Allison said the past year showed the need for U.S. companies to develop a "corporate culture of resiliency."
"Firms that are better prepared" for any kind of disaster "are also better placed to capitalize on the opportunities that such events present," Allison told United Press International.
He said the business sector that exhibited the greatest resiliency at present was the energy industry, especially oil and gas exploitation.
"They've done because they live it every day," said Allison. "You name the threat: corruption, terrorism, war, instability ... (The energy sector) has had to deal with it and that has forcibly installed a culture of resiliency."
The Overseas Security Advisory Council is a federal advisory committee with a U.S. government charter to "promote security cooperation" between the State Department and American businesses and private sector interests all over the world.
The top threats were: in Africa, "targeting of Western interests in the Niger delta," and "corruption and crime;" in Asia, natural disasters and intellectual property theft; in Latin America "political violence and civil unrest;" in the Middle East, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict and the threat from al-Qaida and other Islamic terror groups in the Persian Gulf; and kidnapping, which is listed as a worldwide threat.
The Europe, the council's analysts identify two trends: "radicalism," like "the rise in Islamist extremism across the continent, the extreme wing of animal rights organizations, and right-wing groups associated with skinhead and/or neo-Nazi violence;" and "militant activism," which included the inner city disturbances in France.
