IED threats are often analysed by considering the immediate elements of an attack: the device, perpetrator, method of delivery, and networks supporting manufacture and use (NATO, 2018, pp. 2–3). While these remain essential to threat analysis, they do not fully explain why IED use emerges in a particular environment, how it is sustained, or how the threat may evolve. A fuller picture requires examining the wider actors, motivations, resources, relationships, and conditions that make IED use possible.
The Survey’s recent work distinguishes between several interconnected dimensions of this wider threat environment (Small Arms Survey, 2025b, p. 3): context-specific drivers—such as political, ideological, strategic, economic, criminal, or coercive objectives—help explain why actors choose to use IEDs, while context-specific enablers translate intent into capability through, for example, financing, procurement, technical expertise, manufacture, training, and supporting networks. These drivers and enablers interact with a much broader environment, characterized by political, security, economic, social, legal, and informational factors that may facilitate or constrain IED activity.
Access to materials illustrates these interactions. An actor may, for example, be driven to use IEDs by political, ideological, strategic, or other motivations, but its ability to do so may, in turn, depend on access to commercial explosives, precursor chemicals, detonators, or other dual-use items. Procurement and trafficking networks can enable that access, while gaps in regulatory controls—for instance over dual-use components—and porous borders can create conditions that facilitate the acquisition and movement of these materials (Blancafort and Amoroso, 2024, p. 26; UNSG, 2024, p. 15).
Changes in the wider context can also affect the opportunities and constraints surrounding IED use. Technological, regulatory, economic, and environmental developments may, for example, facilitate access to IED-related materials, resources, knowledge, or capabilities, or otherwise reduce the barriers preventing IED activity (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 2). Similarly, greater access to commercial technologies, digital knowledge networks, electronic financial systems, and innovations across improvised weapon systems can facilitate acquisition, adaptation, and the transfer of knowledge and expertise (UNCCT et al., 2022, p. 30). Such developments do not necessarily generate IED threats themselves; rather, their significance depends on how they interact with existing drivers, enablers, and broader contextual conditions.
Taken together, these interactions show how the IED system is embedded within a wider environment that can enable, constrain, or accelerate its development. Understanding these interactions shifts analysis beyond individual incidents towards examining the relationships and conditions that shape the IED threat over time.
This perspective also supports a more dynamic form of threat assessment. The Survey’s approach to threat assessments analyses not only the ‘what, how, where, when, who, and why’ of IED use, but also broader political, social, economic, and security dynamics (Small Arms Survey, 2025b, p. 9). Rather than treating incident data as an end point, this approach seeks to understand why threats manifest in particular ways, what factors may be sustaining them, and how changes in the operating environment could affect their evolution. This provides the analytical basis for the next step: determining the appropriate combination of preventive, preparedness, and responsive measures in a given context.
| < PREVIOUS | NEXT > |