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This essay is a revised version of a keynote lecture presented at the Prague Insecurity Conference 2017hosted by the Institute of International Relations, Prague and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic.
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This study aimed to investigate the relationship and effect of community participation and conflict management on gold mining resources in Khaochetluk sub-district, Tapkhlo district, Phichit province, Thailand. There were 224 participants derived from a total population of 1,712 who had participated in this study. Researchers employed cross-sectional descriptive research design utilizing questionnaire as an instrument to collect data. This instrument has been piloted and found to be validated after checking by three experts and reliable with high value of Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. The obtained data was analyzed not only using descriptive statistics such as percentage, mean score, standard deviation but also inferential statistics such as Pearson product moment correlation, stepwise multiple linear regression. Findings of the study indicated that both variables namely community participation as well as conflict management were at moderate level. Additionally, Pearson correlation coefficients revealed that community participation had significant, positive, and moderate relationship with conflict management (r = 0.456) at the significant level of 0.01. Consequently, result of this study revealed that there were two significant predictors toward conflict management. These two significant predictors were ‘involvement’ and‘empowerment’ components of community involvement which have successfully contributed 20.1 percent variance of conflict management at 0.01 significant level. Qualitative findings indicated that an establishment of platform to provide opportunities for community participation. An appointed committee needs for monitoring purposes. This study is able to promote the importance of community participation in conflict management.
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Review of: Howard Ball, Working in the Killing Fields: Forensic Science in Bosnia, Potomac Books, 232 str, 2016
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The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility of tracking and identifying military and other security personnel, operating in secretive or restricted areas. Such exposure might have dire consequences from the perspective of counterintelligence or physical security. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and Social Media Intelligence methods and techniques were employed to gather and analyse information on security and military personnel and expose their activities on-line. The case studies presented in the article exemplify utilisation of the new “Suunto” fitness application for open-source-based intelligence research. Despite general Operational Security rules that require all personal data such as names, pictures and habits to be kept discreet, open-source based research with one of the most popular fitness applications allowed the identification of military personnel and government agents operating in Afghanistan, Mali, Syria or working at national military facilities. In a single case, it took the author less than thirty minutes to identify personal details of a US Army soldier in Afghanistan and a Special Forces officer in one of the European countries and obtain their home addresses and pictures of them and their families. The results of the research show how OSINT techniques concerning fitness applications are useful both for intelligence and counterintelligence, specifically for malicious and terrorist purposes, and how necessary it is to make fitness and other, supposedly personal, activity private, especially for those who carry out sensitive missions and work in a restricted or secretive environment.
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Iran has been waging a hybrid war against Israel since the Islamic revolution of 1979. In an era when conventional wars have given way to a different method, hybrid warfare, the main challenge facing states is how to deal with this new type of security threat. Thus, while states have previously faced security threats from regular enemy states’ armies, nowadays hybrid warfare in which non-state actors play a key role has become a widespread security threat that requires democratic states to use very different strategies and tactics to overcome it. Using securitisation theory, which explores how normal issues transform into security threats, this article analyses how the State of Israel has securitised Iranian hybrid warfare which has been mainly executed through its proxy terror organisations of Hezbollah. It does so by applying a revised version of the Copenhagen School’s securitisation framework, which focuses on security practices and is underpinned by an understanding of security as belonging to a continuum. The proxy terror organisations have moved towards the end point of the continuum, which is characterised by survival, existential threats, and militarisation, albeit without completely reaching the end point.
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Persistence and adaptation are the main characteristics that have allowed FARC and Hezbollah to become perhaps the most successful proxy groups in recent years. Both Iran and Venezuela have sponsored the military, political and criminal actions of these alleged insurgent organisations. The main objective of this research was to identify and conceptualise the mitotic evolution of FARC and Hezbollah from purely armed organisms into consolidated political organisations in Colombia and Lebanon, and how this evolution has presented a criminal convergence in Venezuela based on drug trafficking and money laundering. This article is based on a comparative case-study of published research papers, documents, and official statements of FARC and Hezbollah, by applying a rational perspective that allows their performance to be deduced. The research results showed a constant mutation of these hybrid threats. Thus, not only was the political and military success of these organisations established but also the strategic support of a criminal dimension which converged in Venezuela, where the FARC drug trafficking and Hezbollah money laundering were amalgamated. Consequently, the investigation exposes the possible consequences of the FARC-Hezbollah criminal convergence in the Americas and its destabilising effects in the next decade.
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The last decade has seen a growing trend towards the use of proxies in the Middle East and North Africa following the outbreak of the Arab Spring. In this context, the issue of Turkey’s approach to proxy war in these regions has received considerable attention since 2016. Thereby, the purpose of this article is to investigate the essential characteristics of Turkish proxy war strategy in Syria and Libya. As such, this study intends to trace the development of Turkish proxy war strategy by making use of the conceptual frameworks proposed by Groh (2019), O’Brien (2012) and Art (1998). The most obvious finding to emerge from the analysis is that Turkey changed its indirect intervention strategy from donated assistance to proxy warfare in Syria and Libya when it saw a greater need to influence the result of the conflicts. In the case of Syria, this study has shown that the controlthrough-centralisation approach towards the Armed Syrian Opposition has enabled Turkey to carry out an effective proxy war strategy from 2016 onwards. In Libya, the results of this investigation have shown that theTurkish Army has pursued a proxy war strategy since Ankara and the Government of National Accord (GNA) signed an agreement on security and military cooperation in December 2019. The article concludes that Turkey has centralised many revolutionary groups under an Islamist-nationalistic vision and partnered them with its own military in order to expand its influence in the Middle East and North Africa.
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The conflict in Ukraine which has raised from Maidan revolution in 2013/2014 is becoming one of several frozen conflicts in the Post-soviet space. While the conflict has been slowly frozen, a new crisis came in 2020. This article represents a continuation of the previous author’s research of the Conflict in Ukraine. The author tries to find how a pandemic has influenced the conflict. He tries to identify some changes in the behaviour of actors of the conflict. He focuses on the possible changes in behaviour on both, the qualitative and the quantitative level. Finally, he tries to recognize how the conflict has been changed during the pandemic.
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After the Second World War, in order to close the gap in the balance of power in world politics, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) increased its influence in Central and Eastern Europe and partially in the Balkans and developed its nuclear capacity. These developments posed an important threat to the USA. In order to fight with this threat, the report number 68 (NSC-68) was prepared and implemented by the American National Security Council in 1950. In this study, in addition to the analysis of the NSC-68 which was one of the most significiant documents of the Cold War, its Cold War strategy implemented against the USSR and its relations with Turkey are examined accordingly. This report was a guide to the Cold War strategy of the United States of America (USA). The USA focused on nuclear armament and aimed to strengthen the military capacities of its allies within the framework of realistic policy outlined in NSC-68. Thus, it aimed to prevent the USSR's strategy to dominate the world politics. The USA organized its relations with Turkey in line with this report. . The USA entered into military and economic cooperation on many issues by making bilateral agreements with Turkey. This cooperation played a major role in preventing the efforts of the USSR to dominate the World politics by going down to the Mediterranean Sea and hence to warm seas.
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Post-conflict arrangements are always welcomed since they provide solutions to very complicated problems by solving the divisions of power inside non-cohesive societies, harmed by ethnical, national and religious, even sectarian divisions. But those creative solutions as those involved in constructive ambiguities have side effects that produce in time new crises, without a possibility to be solved in the existing framework. Lebanon case could give us lessons learnt on how such arrangements that seem panacea are fighting back and weakening a society and a state. And a crisis of the kind Lebanon faces nowadays is exposing those shortcomings. Those experiences should require a more thorough analysis of the effects in time of the administrative, diplomatic and negotiations agreements, due to solve crisis.
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This article investigates the causes of the shutdown of Libya’s nuclear weapons program, which lasted from the establishment of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime until 2003. The author analyses the phases of the nuclear weapons program, observing three periods, from attempts to purchase a produced nuclear bomb, through establishing cooperation with other countries in order to procure production technology, to the last phase of relying on own capacities with external assistance and illegal procurement of nuclear elements on the black market. By analysing the practices of foreign policy and internal nuclear activities, the author tries to locate the main causes of the stoppage of Libya’s nuclear program through the prism of a realistic paradigm. Rejecting the thesis of insufficient personnel capacity as a reason for stopping the nuclear program and the possibility of economic sanctions to deliver results, the author emphasizes the fear of targeting as the main cause for abandoning nuclear ambitions. Elaborating on Gaddafi’s pragmatism and the difference between declared and real intentions, the author emphasizes the importance of understanding the nature of the regime driven by the desire for the first Arab nuclear bomb. The theory of hegemonic stability offers a basis for a theoretical interpretation of Libyan behaviour and the final abandonment of the nuclear weapon program. This article opens up space for future academic analysis, such as the issue of the capability of nuclear weapons to deter military intervention and whether Libya would be attacked in the case of further work on the nuclear bomb.
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The development of artificial intelligence and management in the field of informatics and cybernetics brought drastic changes in the technical means used in armed conflicts at the beginning of the 21st Century. Technical innovations have made a significant impact on the capability of the Armed Forces. Due to increasing technological progress the Law of Armed Conflict has become inadequate and for that reason has attracted the attention of the doctrine. The use of autonomous and automated combat systems (drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned vehicles and vessels, self-propelled weapons, etc.), which can find targets on their own, do not have a clear legal (international legal) status. Autonomous and automated combat systems themselves are tools, weapons and thus a legitimate military target. The scientific and technological revolution has made significant changes in the field of conducting combat operations, but especially in the area of preparing combat operations and issuing orders for conducting those operations. Thus, the extremely fast and drastic technological development of combat means has doubly influenced the modern conduct of armed struggle. First, he perfected the technique for conducting armed combat and second, according to the principle of feedback, such developed means influenced the emergence of new methods of conducting combat operations and vice versa, the emergence of new demands by military thought for new more sophisticated combat means. The paper aims to define autonomous and automated combat systems and point out possible violations of the norms of international law of armed conflict during the use of these systems. Also, the author points out the legal gaps in the international law of armed conflicts that have emerged with the development of new types of combat systems and their use.
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