Connections

The U.S. should remain committed to Central Asian security co­operation, but must carefully evaluate each program for merit and value added to U.S. security goals in the region. Programs designed to increase Kazakhstan’s military professionalization will have the most significant impact towards accomplishing these goals. U.S. security cooperation effforts to foster the development of a non-commissioned officer corps as part of Kazakhstan’s military would serve as an excellent example of effective professionalization and a way to further our strategic relationships with non-NATO countries. Training programs that professionalize the Kazakh military can offer a cost-effective way for the United States to further a lasting partnership with Central Asia’s most stable country.

Defense Institution Building focuses on change management at the Ministry of Defense level. In order to make sustainable change in any government, the solution has to work through and with the culture of that society. There are ways to reduce hierarchy and uncertainty in na­tional strategy development, national defense organization, legal con­structs, human resource management, financial management, and educa­tional processes. Cultures change from within. If advisors understand the cultural foundations at work, they can better help countries chart paths toward sustainable, transparent governance.

This paper examines NATO’s perception of climate change as a non-traditional threat multiplier. For well over a decade, European as well as Pentagon and other U.S. government studies and policy documents have noted that as the planet continues to warm, arable land continues to disappear, cyclones become more powerful, droughts increase in impact, food shortages are more frequent, and thousands of climate migrants are on the move. All of these climate change-related factors significantly increase the likelihood of conflict escalation. The threat multiplier characteristic of climate change will only exacerbate problems such as government instability, the spread of disease, conflicts over water supplies, the strengthening of terrorism, and widespread migration. This research explores NATO’s initiatives to deal with this non-traditional threat multiplier and analyzes how different schools of international relations theory define climate change and address this security concern. In addition, the article provides insights into how climate change-induced threats affect the socio-economic and political security of nation states and what that means for NATO. Finally, the research provides a review of the Alliance’s engagement, policy frameworks, operations, and units re-sponsible for tackling threats originating from climate change. It concludes with the recommendation that NATO has made significant progress on placing climate change on its threat radar, but that the Alliance will have to do more to integrate these concerns because current efforts are not sufficient to meet future security challenges stimulated by increase in the average global temperature.

Understanding the nature and the extent of the future threat from ISIS has been a key question for scholars, policy makers and security professionals since ISIS started losing significant grounds in Syria and Iraq. This article analyses ISIS terrorism and its possible spillover effects from a regional security perspective by presenting a strategic model to develop options for the policy makers. A strategic understanding, supported by a model that has been designed to capture all possible variables and their interaction which each other, is necessary to understand the future direction of the threat. Many scholars agree that the threat is not only about the organizational structure of ISIS but also its ideological aspect, therefore the model presented here connects the facts and the ideology with variables at three different levels: regional political level; ISIS and its organizational structure; and individual level variables. The model was designed to capture changes with relevant data thus providing a strategic data-driven understanding of the threat. Regional political developments and how ISIS reacts to those developments are the main concerns at the first two levels of analysis. Foreign fighters and other sympathizers are the most important subjects of the study at the individual level with the assumption that the future threat will diffuse through foreign fighters and self-radicalized lone actors.

On December 19th, 2016 Germany saw the first major Islamist terror attack on its soil. A Tunisian asylum seeker crashed a hijacked truck into one of the main Berlin’s Christmas markets. The assault resulted in 12 casualties. In the aftermath, several attempts were made by German parliaments on Länder-level, as well as on federal level, to investigate how the terrorist was able to use 14 different identities, how he carried out the plot, how he escaped and where security authorities failed to prevent the attack.

This article examines the advanced technological, information and cyber components of hybrid war and the introduction of suggested countermeasures to counter information and cyber threats and attacks. The main hypothesis of the authors is that revolutionary development and rapid implementation of technologies in innovative ways in all spheres of life facilitate and shape the basis for the transformation of theoretical and practical paradigms of war and conflict. The focus of the article is on the hybrid nature of modern conflict.

Why do young Muslim women from the whole world join the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, despite the fact that the group is notorious for conducting terrible sexual violations against women? Through comparing how al-Qaeda (AQ) and IS are positioning women in their ideological literature, this article sheds light on IS’ appeal to women. This is interesting, as AQ in a historical perspective only attracted a handful of European women to physically join the group. The comparison highlights that AQ and IS position women in different ways: as housewives, migrants, warriors and sex slaves. Both groups’ ideologies agree that a woman’s primarily role is to be a housewife and mother, and exclude in principle women from the battlefield. However, only IS is emphasizing that Muslim women have a right and duty to migrate to its territory. Through using ideological arguments in its literature, IS convinces its supporters that it is a religious duty to enslave women the group defines as idolaters. For this reason, IS’ brutality against non-Muslim women will not discourage its female supporters from joining the group.

This article reviews important differences in how Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham perceive the role of the foreign fighter and outlines local dilemmas integrating foreign fighters entails for the three movements. It shows how, in addition to boosting fighting capacity, a high number of foreigners might also represent a crucial weakness.