Generolo Jono Žemaičio Lietuvos karo akademija

The elementary interest of every country is to maintain its inner security and stability. To achieve this goal the state must restrict within legal frameworks some fundamental rights of its own citizens. One of these fundamental rights is the right to privacy that can be breached only under certain circumstances. It is easy to see that it is unacceptable for a state not to control within the legal frameworks the communication of its own citizens so they can commit crimes, run terrorist rings, or spy rings or establish drug cartels without any consequences. Of course, the control over the communication is not the only means of the successful investigation but undeniably a vital one. That is why the Janus faced nature of the Dark Web is a real security risk nowadays. Although this new medium is the fruit of the last two decades its presence today is stronger than ever before and its popularity is growing day by day. Its most important features are anonymity, hidden geolocation and freedom from censorship. The Dark Web is very useful when it provides anonymity for political dissidents and whistleblowers, but is very harmful when it provides the same features for arm and drug traffickers and terrorists not to mention for pedophiles and so on. This article aims to shed some light on the effects of the Dark Web on the security and economy of the states especially in the aspects of organized crime and the terrorism.

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.

Barry Buzan’s thought has shaped constructivism and International Security Studies since the 1990s. In this paper, it is argued that ISS does insufficient justice to the case of the Iraqi Kurdish military counterattacks and wider societal mobilization against ISIS. The paper introduces the concepts of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous securitization, where the referent object of securitization is not the nation state or even the Kurdistan Region but the more traditionally defined community and its individual members, plus religiously or ethnically defined groups that are under the protection of the regionally dominant identity community. Worryingly, in Sunni Arab areas such as Mosul, insurrection and semi-spontaneous securitization has been an aspect to how ISIS captured that city. Further theoretical problems such as the securitization of immigration in Buzan’s theoretical framework, are exposed and applied to the case of ISIS and Iraqi Kurdistan. Research for this article took place during on the field visits to Erbil and the KRI in 2016 by the author and his team of HDF General Staff Scientific Research Centre.

This paper is mapping the migratory routes to Europe, details their characteristics and briefs the ongoing changes in the political, economic and social sphere. Though many people think that migration towards Europe is a recent phenomenon, it have been lasting – with diverse intensity – for centuries now, even its main tracks remained almost the same. There are routes that are crowded with migrants at one year and – due to European border authorities’ counter-measurements – are empty a few months later. Considering the adaptability of these migratory routes, detecting, tracking and detailing them are a significant challenge, although, in order to manage the recent crisis, analysis and the appropriate use of the information on migratory routes are essential. This motivated me to briefly delineate the main paths used by the illegal migrants on their ways to Europe. This paper however, does not elaborate on the movements within the EU and the ways connecting the member countries.

News took wing recently, ISIS is responsible for the migration pressure afflicting the Western World, furthermore ISIS wants to send terrorists among the mass of immigrants into Europe and America, where they – as a “third column” – are going to carry out terrorist attacks, similar to 9/11, at the proper time. This news generated serious debates and emotions in the Western World. Some people say, the threat sould be taken seriously, others claims the ISIS is not able to carry out such well co-ordinated action, and the Western countries has to let in all of the immigrants indiscriminately, apart from the fact, if we are able to integrate them or not.