Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The protection of cultural heritage is an important element of a country’s cultural policy. The article describes the nature of threats posed by armed conflicts to cultural heritage and the destruction of Ukrainian cultural property by Russian aggression in 2022. The article aims at discussion of the consequences of Russia’s deliberate destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage and offers an interdisciplinary insight into protection of cultural heritage during the contemporary armed conflict. These initial observations from Russian aggression against Ukraine serve as a starting point for a discussion on challenges related to the protection of cultural heritage during a potential armed conflict in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on practical observations from Ukraine, the article calls for improvements to the protection of cultural heritage in Poland.

The protection of cultural heritage is seen as an important element of a country’s cultural policy. The article describes the nature of the threats posed by Russian aggression on Ukrainian cultural heritage and the destruction of cultural property. The article was aimed at highlighting the consequences of Russia’s deliberate destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage and an interdisciplinary look at its value and protection during the contemporary armed conflict. This assessment can serve as a starting point for a discussion on the challenges related to the protection of cultural heritage during a potential armed conflict in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on practical examples of Ukraine, solutions were proposed to improve the protection of cultural heritage in Poland.

Despite rich experience indicating that waging wars is risky and not very ‘profitable’, particularly from the last decades’ perspective, and it also has a demoralizing effect on societies engaged in the conflict strengthening the tendency to aggression, nationalism, at the same time destroying the natural environment, it is difficult to imagine the world without an armed confrontation in the future. Such a course of action is proven by ‘the Ukrainian scenario’, or the situation in the Middle East. Motives pushing people to armed confrontations are quite complex and do not result from a simple need of domination and possession. War is quite closely connected with the domain of the sacred. Violence and religion are placed in close neighbourhood. Thus can values represented by great monotheist religions be ‘useful’ in the conducted polemological-irenological discourse and in the process of building a desired international security system? Do the components fostering war aggression dominate over ‘pacifist reflection’ in Judaic-Christian and Islamic spirituality? One may risk a statement that religion regardless of time and latitude, is not an indifferent factor from the point of view of waged conflicts.

Polemology and irenology that have been evolving since the Second World War are relatively unknown. There is much misunderstanding about polemology and irenology and what can be done with research results. The methodological competition between polemology and irenology indicates their differences due to the opposite research subject (war-peace), the system of concepts, and the usefulness of research results. The aim of the article is to present the basic assumptions of irenological and polemological research and to propose a common area of research on peace and armed conflicts. The article presents a thesis about the need to integrate polemological and irenological research. Due to the research problem and the subject of research, a qualitative strategy and appropriate research methods were used in the research process. The obtained research result indicates that it is not justified to conduct research on peace and armed conflicts separately, but as a whole as a study of peace and armed conflicts. The conclusions from the research indicate that the genesis, diagnosis and prognosis of peace and conflict-related processes is justified in the range of long cycles from minus 50 to plus 50 years in relation to the started research process.

Since September 11, 2001, airport security control procedures have expanded in the face of the increased threat of terrorist attacks on aircrafts and airports. Obligatory and meticulous checks are carried out on all passengers although the overwhelming majority of passengers do not pose any risk. Current airport control procedures are expensive and inefficient; they extend the time spent by passengers at the airport and contribute to increased crowding; they inhibit the development of interconnected transport systems and significantly reduce the comfort of passengers who pose no threat. As the security needs of air transport morph, security experts are considering replacing the existing across-the-board procedures with personalized and more selective control processes based on data and behavioral analysis to reduce the duration of airport check-in procedures and improve the effectiveness of security controls. Such solutions have been successfully tested over the past decades at Israeli airports and check-in terminals by the Israeli state carrier El Al, which has the reputation of being the best-protected airline in the world. The FLYSEC system, developed and tested in 2015-2018 at Luxembourg Airport in cooperation with the local university, operates on similar principles although its implementation is less invasive. Modern computer tools for analyzing travel history data and data from current bookings as well as algorithmic methods of behavioral analysis based on advanced detection, identification, crowdsourcing and tracking systems all feed into such smart, selective and personalized security controls. Smart, selective control systems are based on the basic assumption that passengers can be accurately and effectively sorted into different risk groups (e.g. low-risk/trusted passengers, normal passengers, high-risk passengers), long before they arrive at the airport and create a real threat. There are many effective techniques for profiling and identifying perpetrators already used in criminology, criminalistics and computer forensics that are also suitable for use in smart security systems to better meet the current and future needs of civil air transport. The article presents the idea and general characteristics of smart, selective and personalized security control systems, followed by structuring of the analytical field and problem analysis in terms of their implementation conditions, opportunities, threats, conflict-forming potentials and controversies, as well as the needs for more detailed research and their suggested directions.