Challenges to national defence in contemporary geopolitical situation

The subject of this article concerns the safety of mass events and is dictated by their increasing popularity. Mass events are organized at various levels of the territorial division and have a very diverse range. Their safe organization and course are important from the point of view of the country’s internal security. The authors provide novel insights into risk management peculiarities of mass events in designed to prevent possible terrorist activities.

The aim of the article is to present Chechen terrorism as a consequence of violations of basic human rights, including the crimes of genocide committed by the Russian Federation in the First Russo-Chechen War in 1994-1996. It has been argued that terrorism has become a dramatic way of drawing the international community’s attention to the tragedy taking place in Chechnya. Over time, Chechen fighters were influenced by radical Muslim groups and used terrorist fighting methods. On the other hand, the Russians did not shy away from bombing entire villages they suspected of sheltering wanted fighters. All this led to an escalation of terrorism and radicalization of religious views among a large part of the society. Moreover, the lack of a decisive reaction from the West to the policy of exterminating the Chechen population by the Russian Federation has led to an increase in anti-Western sentiment, which had not been recorded in Chechnya before.

9/11 made terrorism a part of everyday life on a global basis, attacking civilisation as a whole. As a result, the activity of terrorist organisations reduces people’s sense of security even in their everyday lives, by randomly attacking high public density targets with a huge emotional and publicity impact. The states cannot guarantee security through their law enforcement agencies alone, as the sources of danger have multiplied and become more unpredictable. Therefore, it is more important than ever to involve communities, social organisations, economic and market actors in maintaining common security. Private security thus plays by now an extremely important role in completing public order and security. The radicalisation trend within the terrorist organisations results in a growing number of internal terrorism threats. Given that terrorists aim to choose targets with a likely “success” of their acts, it is important to highlight those whose partial, temporary or total downtime entails consequences which would also make other infrastructures inoperative. Those who from these aspects turn to be the most important, and their continuous and well-functioning operation are essential to the operation of other infrastructures, are called critical infrastructures. If we put the above phenomena together, a clear conflict emerges: critical infrastructure protection, although in most cases not state owned, is also a common security issue, protected mostly by private security services, employing people mainly trained for private security tasks. Our article highlights this problem introducing the scientific background, also suggesting a possible solution for evaluation.

Soft targets are places that are typical of a large concentration of population and a low level of security. Compared to so-called hard targets, these places are not permanently protected. Soft targets are shopping centers, clubs, restaurants, schools, transport, airport terminals, gatherings, entertainment centres etc. Soft targets are increasingly being chosen as a target for terrorists. It is caused mainly by its characteristics. This paper focuses on the safety situation of soft targets due to current threats of terrorist attacks, it specifically addresses the issue of safety in the entertainment industry. Based on the available terrorist attacks database, terrorist attacks, attacks on soft targets and entertainment during the years 1970–2017 were evaluated. There is an increase specifically in attacks on soft targets and attacks on entertainment in the years 2005–2015 and the most in 2011–2015. Based on the analysis of available data, basic safety measures have been designed to increase the resilience of soft targets – entertainment centres that are used for other objects and events with a large number of citizens. The aim of this article is to establish basic criteria to identify soft targets and to assign a level of importance to the criteria based on a questionnaire survey carried out among professionals.

This paper focuses on terrorist attacks carried out by so-called ‘lone wolves’ or ‘lone actors’. It provides an analytical evaluation of the basic characteristics of these attackers and discusses possible access to their identification in society. To create the profile of a ‘typical’ lone wolf, we collected information from a database of lone wolves who committed their terrorist attacks in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland, Norway and Australia from 1998 to 2016. Based on these data, it was demonstrated that lone wolves are not homogenous group, therefore, there is no one ‘typical’ lone wolf. Instead, three main groups of lone wolves were identified: 1) lone wolves with a criminal past, 2) lone wolves with a mental illness and 3) young lone wolves coming from minority groups in the country. These characteristics could be used as an auxiliary tool by state security forces during identification of potential lone wolf terrorists.