Risks & Critiques Overview
Freeze–Vote–Rebuild is designed to function under conditions of high distrust, but it still has significant failure modes. This section catalogs risks, common critiques, and mitigations, providing a structure for making the framework more resilient.
Objectives
- Identify Failure Modes Early: Detect and define risks before they become active crises.
- Explicit Risk Ownership: Clarify which actors (domestic or international) are responsible for specific mitigations.
- Design Integration: Tie mitigations directly to verification gates, incentives, and operational rules.
- Credible Responses: Provide objective, design-based replies to common political and ethical critiques.
How Risks are Handled in This Framework
This section is organized into four key pillars:
- Failure Modes: A deep dive into what can go wrong (e.g., monitor obstruction, voter coercion) and why.
- Risk Register: A structured table containing likelihood, impact, specific mitigations, and assigned owners.
- Common Critiques & Responses: A "steelman" approach to objections (e.g., "This rewards the aggressor") paired with operational replies.
- Ethical Considerations: Managing moral and political risks, such as the tension between stability and justice.
Linking Risk to Execution
Risk handling is not a separate exercise; it is hard-wired into the following systems:
Risk Philosophy
- Assume Adversarial Behavior: Do not design for "good faith." Expect spoilers and manipulation attempts.
- Design for Reversibility: Ensure that if a gate is failed, the process can pause or roll back to a safer state.
- Multi-Indicator Gating: Use diverse data sources to make the system harder to "game" by single actors.
- Staged Commitments: Prefer incremental unlocks over large, irreversible political concessions.
Where to Start
- Failure Modes
The technical and political ways the framework can break.
- Risk Register
The operational tool for tracking and mitigating active risks.
