An apolitical risk assessment of the 2024 US elections: The threat of widespread riots and significant business disruption

Author's Biography

Mike Blyth DBA, is the Chief Executive Officer for Sigma7 University, an international resilience and training services corporation. He has a Doctorate in business administration with a focus on organisational resilience and a Master’s in security and emergency management. His books Security and Risk Management: Protecting People and Sites Worldwide and Business Continuity Management: Building the Incident Management Plan are published by Wiley and Sons. He has worked in dynamic and high-risk scenarios in nearly 50 countries, and directly supports strategic resilience and crisis response efforts across a wide cross-section of sectors and industries.

Antony Sherlock is the Travel Security Program Manager for Apple. After a career working in higher-risk and remote environments, Antony was tasked to build Apple’s travel security programme. He leads a team that supports 80,000 travellers a year to over 130 countries. He has worked as part of Apple’s crisis management team, including leading the operational response to the Ukraine evacuation. Prior to entering the technology sector, Antony was the deputy head of the BBC’s high-risk team, providing guidance to some of the BBC’s most challenging productions. Antony has an Honours degree in history from the Open University.

Sula Mpande is the Head of Crisis and Resilience at Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence (AI) large language model (LLM) research company. He has a Postgraduate Certificate in the provision of healthcare in austere environments from the University of South Wales, a Bachelor of Science in Paramedicine from Sterling University and multiple certificates in everything from executive close protection to rapid sequence induction and intubation. Sula’s experience spans crisis management, emergency preparedness and risk mitigation roles at Cruise, Stanford University, Microsoft and the U.S. Department of State. He has supported critical operations in high-stakes environments globally, leveraging his background in UK Special Forces medicine and counter-terrorism. At Anthropic, Sula applies his expertise to redefine industry standards and implement cutting-edge resilience processes tailored to the unique needs of the high-technology AI sector.

Daniel Beale is the Chief Security Officer at Halliburton. Halliburton is a Fortune 500 company and one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the energy industry with operations in over 70 countries. He holds a Master’s degree in security management from the University of Leicester, UK and is a board-certified protection professional with the American Society for Industrial Security. With over 20 years’ operational and strategic experience in the energy and defence sectors, Daniel is well versed in asset protection, business continuity and crisis management.