Regional Tabletop Exercises

UNIDIR’s strategic tabletop exercises are designed to offer participants a simulated environment where they make concrete crisis-management choices in order to explore the formal and informal frameworks that govern decision-making processes.

These exercises can support Member States in:

Assessing policy options available to them in the face of a given crisis or conflict.
Identifying strengths and weaknesses in current crisis and conflict management architectures at the regional and multilateral levels.
Consolidating and creating connections within a community of stakeholders that would need to cooperate during management of a given crisis or conflict.

The threat scenarios used in these exercises are informed by real-life incidents. During the 2022 exercises on responding to regional cyber crises, participants were asked to simulate a fictional Regional Advisory Group of Experts sitting above all of the major national and regional bodies, and independent of them.

Groups were asked to consider the situation and recommend courses of action for implementation by the national, regional and international bodies, building on real world instruments and frameworks.

In 2022, a series of successful in-person exercises were organized with the regional organizations ASEAN, the OAS and the Mediterranean Forum.

Participants included government officials from foreign ministries and other designated entities involved in national, regional and international cybersecurity issues. These in-person exercises were held in Indonesia, Mexico and Italy.

Watch a brief interview with one of our participants here: