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An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various topics within the issue, including human rights, international human rights law, and counterterrorism.

The Hawala system, an informal and traditional money transfer mechanism, has been a subject of concern for counterterrorism and counterintelligence agencies worldwide due to its potential exploitation for illicit financial activities, including terrorism financing. This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the Hawala system's presence in the Western Balkans, a region historically characterized by geopolitical complexity and a complex security landscape. Drawing on empirical data and regulatory analysis, this study explores the challenges posed by the Hawala system in the context of counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts in the Western Balkans. It examines the system's vulnerabilities, its exploitation for terrorism financing and the difficulties faced by intelligence agencies in monitoring and disrupting Hawala networks. Moreover, the paper assesses the regulatory frameworks implemented by countries in the region and offers practical policy recommendations to enhance counterterrorism and counterintelligence strategies, fostering greater security and stability in the Western Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from a definition of terrorism which is widely accepted and frequently used in scientific publications in Serbia, due to its compatibility and accuracy. The paper also explores the reasons for adopting such a definition of counterterrorism (CT), which encompasses a wide spectrum of countermeasures, normative frameworks and institutional architectures. In order to fundament the scientific discourse, the concept of risk was examined, as well as indications about an essential element of risk, i.e. the negative consequences for the entity. In the definition of risk, as one of its key elements, the vulnerability of entities is emphasized, which includes their resistance or, to put it differently, their ability to carry out adequate responses. This aspect is highlighted as it confirms the goal of the model of analysing the concept of counterterrorism, but also the deepest basis for the construction of the CT concept. Additionally, some components of the new intelligence paradigms are also highlighted, which may be of relevance for the research of the CT concepts. The paper concludes that the adaptability of the normative and institutional framework is the main objectives of the CT constructions. Adaptability also pertains to action plans and measures to the current threats and must include timely determination of the directions and instruments for action, as well as the establishment of solutions that involve the anticipation of future risks. It has been previously highlighted that the goal of CT is to achieve the coordination of the strategic, tactical, and operational level of activity and provide an innovative, creative and proactive perspective. The key direction in the field of CT is not only to achieve efficiency, but to be effective as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The northwest province of Xinjiang in the People's Republic of China has drawn international attention recently because of state-perpetrated violence towards its non-Han population. This paper examines how Chinese authorities construct their narratives about the Xinjiang issue and justify their actions in the region. The analysis will focus on official white papers published by the State's Council Information Office. Through the investigation of these documents, three main narratives on Xinjiang will be presented, together with the way they have developed over the past decades. Each will then be situated within the larger transformation of Chinese politics and political discourse in recent years, especially since General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping has taken office. Instead of considering Beijing's narratives on Xinjiang as an exception, this essay maintains that their underlying paradigms accord with Chinese governmental strategy as a whole, although the repression in Xinjiang represents their extreme consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Jurídica Cesumar: Mestrado is the property of Revista Juridica Cesumar - Mestrado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on how jihad - a term synonymous with 'struggle' in Islam - has been associated with and used in entirely different meanings in Australian newspapers. Orientalism permeates Australian newspapers even today and different media outlets tend to follow an agenda when presenting news. The media is a powerful tool and has the capacity to influence people's perceptions and outlook towards any phenomenon. Australian newspapers' representation of jihad in a particular context solidifies its meaning as a 'holy war' whereas the Qur'ān has an entirely different meaning for this concept. Jihad is used in articles that focus on terrorist activities carried out by Muslims, issues related to Muslim immigration and even when presenting news regarding counterterrorism measures adopted by the Australian government. However, as demonstrated in this article, the representation of these issues varies extensively across newspapers, with The Australian being a much more biased newspaper than the Sydney Morning Herald. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Masyarakat, Kebudayaan & Politik is the property of Universitas Airlangga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

At present, terrorism has become an important factor affecting world peace and development. As the time series data of terrorist attacks usually show a high degree of spatial–temporal correlation, the spatial–temporal prediction of casualties in terrorist attacks is still a significant challenge in the field of counter-terrorism. Most of the existing terrorist attack prediction methods lack the ability to model the spatial–temporal dynamic correlation of the time series data of terrorist attacks, so they cannot yield satisfactory prediction results. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention-based spatial–temporal multi-graph convolutional network (AST-MGCN) for casualty prediction of terrorist attacks. Specifically, we construct the spatial adjacency graph and spatial diffusion graph based on the different social-spatial dynamic relationships of terrorist attacks and determine the multi-scale period of time series data of terrorist attacks by using wavelet transform to model the temporal trend, period and closeness properties of terrorist attacks. The AST-MGCN mainly consists of spatial multi-graph convolution for extracting social-spatial features in multi-views and temporal convolution for capturing the transition rules. In addition, we also use the spatial–temporal attention mechanism to effectively capture the most relevant spatial–temporal dynamic information. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its independence, Uzbekistan has often portrayed terrorism as one of the gravest threats to its sovereignty, integrity, unity, and internal stability. Uzbekistan's authoritarian regime has been perceived endorsing and executing a series of counter-terrorism policies to exorcise this hazardous threat that includes all possible tactics for eliminating terrorism from the respective region. Unlike the state's proclamation about the increasing gravity of the terrorist threat, some international human right organizations and Central Asian experts depict an opposite picture of it. They are seen to be very critical of the state's exaggerated version of the terrorist threat and question the state's intention behind such projection. This paper makes a systematic effort to critically examine how Uzbekistan's authoritarian leaders have constructed official discourse on terrorism, taking into consideration the social, political and economic context of the region. The paper also examines the authenticity of the state's continuous projection of terrorism to be one of the gravest threats to the sovereignty and integrity of the region by incorporating and analyzing a detailed account of the terrorist acts that have taken place in Uzbekistan since 1991 to 2018. Finally, the paper also explains why the Uzbek authoritarian regime is keen to construct terrorism to be one of the most dangerous threats to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature of the relationship between right-wing populism and radicalisation to Islamic extremism in the UK. Through the critical analysis of themes and commonalities within existing literature on both individual fields, it is shown that there exists a relationship between the two phenomena, though this relationship has many intricacies. This paper argues that right-wing populism, along with counter-terrorism policy and the media, construct an anti-Muslim narrative, which fosters discrimination and, ultimately, leads to the social exclusion of Muslim suspect communities, a known cause of radicalisation. This research further reveals that this relationship, while significant, is not causal, using cumulative extremism to explain its multidirectional nature. Drawing attention to the relationship between right-wing populism and radicalisation opens up a new approach to understanding the impact current UK politics and the media have on the issue of "homegrown" terrorism. This paper aims to promote engagement with the question of how, as a society, we can implement more effective and less discriminative counter-terrorism policy, as well as become more aware of the impact of the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic terrorism. Using a cross-national, time-series analysis of 114 countries from 1991–2017, and employing structural equation modeling to test a number of mediating factors, we find that the impact of FDI on domestic terrorism depends on the host state's level of economic development. For host countries at higher-income levels, FDI boosts economic development and global integration promoting prosperity, increasing counterterrorism resources, and reducing the economic grievances that foster terrorism. Conversely, for lower-income host countries, increased FDI fuels higher domestic terrorism, as it intensifies clashes between traditional and modern elements within society, raises economic discrimination, heightens perceptions of economic insecurity, and subsequently leads to grievances directed against the state. Our results indicate a curvilinear relationship between FDI inflows and domestic terrorism, suggesting that FDI produces a double-edged sword between promoting economic development and increasing domestic terrorism in host states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hawala system, an informal and traditional money transfer mechanism, has been a subject of concern for counterterrorism and counterintelligence agencies worldwide due to its potential exploitation for illicit financial activities, including terrorism financing. This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the Hawala system’s presence in the Western Balkans, a region historically characterized by geopolitical complexity and a complex security landscape. Drawing on empirical data and regulatory analysis, this study explores the challenges posed by the Hawala system in the context of counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts in the Western Balkans. It examines the system’s vulnerabilities, its exploitation for terrorism financing and the difficulties faced by intelligence agencies in monitoring and disrupting Hawala networks. Moreover, the paper assesses the regulatory frameworks implemented by countries in the region and offers practical policy recommendations to enhance counterterrorism and counterintelligence strategies, fostering greater security and stability in the Western Balkans.

Despite the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) being tasked with being a core policy tool of the European Union and helping to shape its research funding agenda on preventing violent extremism, very little is known about how it operates, the practices and activities it engages with and the discourses it mobilizes to do so. This study fills this gap through an in-depth investigation into RAN's working group on education, critically examining the construction and enactment of discourses and practices related to the prevention of violent extremism through education. Combining a critical engagement of organizational practices with a discourse analysis of the various RAN EDU outputs, such as manifestos, policy papers and videos, it offers an examination of the discursive terrain of the European Commission, revealing the normative values and ideological assumptions underpinning it, as well as the subject-positioning of students and teachers involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tajikistan, a country overloaded with the horrific memory of bloody civil war, an increasingly devastated economy, and the ineradicable misfortune of having long borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, has been reigning consistently by the Emomali Rahmon's regime for three decades with wide-scale surveillance and draconian acts. Taking advantage of the weak governance, poor military infrastructure and porous border, Islamic extremists and cross border terrorist groups have also been seen persistently deepening their influence in the region either by perpetrating a series of terrorist activities in the terrain or joining Tajik national into their organizations. This paper presents a detailed analysis of how and to what extent terrorism has posed security threats to Tajikistan through examining the Global Terrorism Database and RAND database that includes the numbers and intensity of the terrorist incidents in the territory since independence. It systematically analyses the prominent terrorist groups and, more particularly, the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), which has widened its network in the region. The paper also makes a sincere effort to evaluate the counter-terrorism acts adopted and implemented by Tajikistan. Moreover, the article also examines how the Tajik's authority constructs state discourse on terrorism by delegitimising social acceptance of the terrorist on the one hand and projecting the state as the severe victim of terrorism on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK government's 'Prevent' counter‐extremism policy was placed on a statutory footing in 2015, requiring specified authorities including NHS providers by law to work to 'prevent people being drawn into terrorism', leading to calls for a boycott on ethical grounds. Since 2016, mental health professionals have been embedded within counterterrorism police units in 'Vulnerability Support Hubs', to assist in the management of individuals referred to Prevent perceived to have vulnerabilities related to mental health. Drawing on data obtained through Freedom of Information requests, this paper examines these hubs in the context of Prevent's racial politics. It examines the pseudo‐scientific concept of radicalization through the lens of racialization theory and explores the whitewashing and colourblindness endemic to most research and practice at the nexus of counterterrorism and mental health. Four ethical issues arising from the hubs are highlighted: (a) the securitization of care, including the way counterterrorism concerns appear to influence medical treatment regimes; (b) harm, including potential criminalization; (c) the erosion of patient agency and confidentiality; and (d) the pathologization of political dissent. It is argued that due to the UK's status as a leading innovator in the field of counter‐radicalization, all of these highly racialized phenomena hold wider relevance and augur a troubling direction of travel for counterterrorism's turn towards mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of civil wars have long argued that non-state actors can use selective punishment to reduce collaboration with state adversaries. However, there is little systematic evidence confirming this claim, nor investigation into the mechanisms at play. In this paper, we provide such evidence from the drone war in Pakistan. Militants in Pakistan's tribal areas engaged in a brutal counterespionage campaign with the aim of reducing collaboration with the United States. Our analysis combines a novel dataset of collaborator killings with data on drone strike outcomes. We find that strikes killed half as many militant leaders and fighters following collaborator killings and that this suppressive effect likely works by deterring spying in the future. Beyond providing an empirical confirmation of the selective punishment hypothesis, our paper suggests an unacknowledged vulnerability of the drone program to reprisals against local allies and collaborators that limits its effectiveness as a long-term tool of counterterrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political leaders, philosophers, sociologists, historians, political scientists, law scholars and economists approach terrorism in diverse ways, especially its definition. Politicians assign the meaning to the term terrorism that best suits them. Political scientists analyze the actions of those in the geopolitical framework. Moral philosophers look at terrorism from the viewpoint of fairness. Historians make a comparative assessment of the phenomenon through its evolution over time, and scholars of law simply dissect counterterrorism measures and assess their consistency with customs and current legislation. Sociologists stress the importance of culture, social relationships and social interactions. Eventually, politicians and lawmakers are not immune to the influence of the common ethics and morals of their own societies and the uses and habits of their own cultures, including religious aspects. Morals and ethics relate to "right" and "wrong" conduct; the first provides guiding principles, and the latter refers to rules provided by an external source, e.g., codes of conduct in workplaces or principles in religions. While morals are concerned with principles of right and wrong, ethics are related to right and wrong conduct of an individual in a particular situation. Ethics, morals and religion are intertwined in the antithetical principles "good and evil." This work aims to scrutinize the crucial concept of just and unjust war, and just and unjust combatants, and to elaborate on some critical moral and ethical elements within the modern understanding of the interplay between terrorism, counterterrorism, fundamental human rights, and international humanitarian law. Through the examination of all pertinent theoretical positions the paper seeks to shed light on the limits of the use of force and the justification of the violation of fundamental rights in the War on Terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have examined the impact of the relationship between international nongovernmental organisations and the military on peacekeeping operations and humanitarian programming. However, how relations between international nongovernmental organisations and military actors affect preventing/countering of violent extremism has not been central to existing debates. By using the qualitative-dominant mixed methods approach, this paper investigates relations between these actors in Northeast Nigeria and argues that the dynamic interactions between international nongovernmental organisations and the military largely breed mistrust and conflict between them. This undermines the capacity of international nongovernmental organisations to prevent/counter violent extremism. The paper concludes that mutual respect for the operational procedures of the military and international nongovernmental organisations in the Northeast is relevant for an enhanced relationship between them and sustainable preventing/countering violent extremism programming in Nigeria and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper highlights the way of developing on a scale of 1:1 a microwave generating device, a prototype that is designed for being used in the special missions assigned to military engineer specialists to combat terrorism. This device, used as a psychotronic weapon, can remotely neutralize various brain centers, thus preventing the terrorist action to be carried out by the person concerned. The paper presents in detail the organological construction and the operation of this device, also pointing out the advantages, the scientific novelty and the originality of the use of such a prototype in counterterrorist actions.e [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Political Science Review / Przegląd Politologiczny is the property of Faculty of Political Science & Journalism, Adam Mickiewicz University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 places a specific duty on clearly identified actors to prevent terrorism. This paper adopts a poststructuralist approach to deconstruct the Prevent Duty's ideology and discourse. Using Foucauldian terminology, Prevent is conceptualised as a proactive dispositif to manage the risk of extremism in the UK, in that it is an 'ensemble of discourses,' 'regulatory decisions' and 'moral positions' (Foucault, 1980: 194) that constitute a complex system of response to the threat of terrorism. A globalised state of (in)security is posited as a major influence for Prevent's inception. The formulation of the policy text is underpinned by the neoliberal govemmentality of the Big Society. The paper problematises its implementation in the education sector through the analysis of the 'duty' to promote British values in the classroom and the expectation of 'preventing people from being drawn into terrorism' (HM Government, 2011; 2019). It concludes that the dispositif is driven by principles of human rights and proactivity, however, it has been largely misinterpreted due to lack of clarity and the assumption of shared values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Historica. Historia Contemporánea is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The vast, open, and interconnected characteristics of the transportation system make it a prime target for terrorists and hackers. However, there are no standard measures of transport system vulnerability to physical or cyberattacks. The separation of governance over different modes of transport increases the difficulty of coordination in developing and enforcing a common security index. This paper contributes a perspective and roadmap toward developing multimodal security indices that can leverage a variety of existing and emerging connected vehicle, sensing, and computing technologies. The proposed technologies include positive train control (PTC), vehicle-to-everything (V2X), weight-in-motion (WIM), advanced air mobility (AAM), remote sensing, and machine learning with cloud intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To protect user privacy in wireless mesh networks, it is important to address two major challenges, namely, flow untraceability and movement untraceability, which prevent malicious attackers from deducing the flow paths and the movement tracks of mobile devices. For these two privacy requirements, most existing approaches rely on encrypting the whole packet, appending random padding, and applying random delay for each message at every intermediate node, resulting in significant computational and communication overheads. Recently, linear network coding (LNC) has been introduced as an alternative, but the global encoding vectors (GEVs) of coded messages have to be encrypted by homomorphic encryption to conceal the relationships between incoming and outgoing messages. In this paper, we aim to explore the potential of LNC to ensure flow untraceability and movement untraceability. Specifically, we first determine the necessary and sufficient condition, with which the two privacy requirements can be achieved without encrypting either GEVs or message contents. We then design a deterministic untraceable LNC (ULNC) scheme to provide flow untraceability and movement untraceability when the sufficient and necessary condition is satisfied. We also provide extensive theoretical analysis on the probability that the condition is satisfied, as well as abundant discussions on the key parameters that affect the value of the probability. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the proposed ULNC scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fast and precise querying in a given set of trajectory points is an important issue of trajectory query. Typically, there are massive trajectory data in the database, yet the query sets only have a few points, which is a challenge for the superior performance of trajectory querying. The current trajectory query methods commonly use the tree-based index structure and the signature-based method to classify, simplify, and filter the trajectory to improve the performance. However, the unstructured essence and the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the trajectory-sequence lead these methods to a high degree of spatial overlap, frequent I/O, and high memory occupation. Thus, they are not suitable for the time-critical tasks of trajectory big data. In this paper, a query method of trajectory is developed on the Bloom Filter. Based on the gridded space and geocoding, the spatial trajectory sequences (tracks) query is transformed into the query of the text string. The geospace was regularly divided by the geographic grid, and each cell was assigned an independent geocode, converting the high-dimensional irregular space trajectory query into a one-dimensional string query. The point in each cell is regarded as a signature, which forms a mapping to the bit-array of the Bloom Filter. This conversion effectively eliminates the high degree of overlap and instability of query performance. Meanwhile, the independent coding ensures the uniqueness of the whole tracks. In this method, there is no need for additional I/O on the raw trajectory data when the track is queried. Compared to the original data, the memory occupied by this method is negligible. Based on Beijing Taxi and Shenzhen bus trajectory data, an experiment using this method was constructed, and random queries under a variety of conditions boundaries were constructed. The results verified that the performance and stability of our method, compared to R*tree index, have been improved by 2000 to 4000 times, based on one million to tens of millions of trajectory data. And the Bloom Filter-based query method is hardly affected by grid size, original data size, and length of tracks. With such a time advantage, our method is suitable for time-critical spatial computation tasks, such as anti-terrorism, public safety, epidemic prevention, and control, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hesitant fuzzy set has been studied as a powerful tool to describe the decision makers' judgements under uncertain environment and applied to many domains. For solving the matrix games whose payoffs are expressed by the hesitant fuzzy information, the paper proposes the Ambika method of hesitant fuzzy matrix games (HFMGs). In this paper, firstly, the formal representation of HFMGs is established to meet the conditions of two-person finite zero-sum games. Secondly, after a new method of adding elements to the shorter hesitant fuzzy elements (HFEs), i.e. the hesitant fuzzy elements with possibility, is developed to keep the same length of HFEs, a weighting method based on the position of element in the HFEs is proposed. Then the hesitant fuzzy bi-objective nonlinear programming models for both players are established for HFMGs. Thirdly, according to the proposed value and ambiguity indexes, the Ambika method of HFMGs is developed to find the optimal solutions of mixed strategies by solving the converted linear programming models. Finally, as the illustration of the proposed method, a numerical example about how to choose the optimal solutions for a state security department is given in the counter-terrorism issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss terrorism as an adversity to global security, with special emphasis on Kosovo. The presented data shows that today, terrorism poses a risk to more than half of the world's population. Although a small country, Kosovo, has not been left out of this negative societal phenomenon. More specifi cally, according to international reports, the threat and danger to Kosovo from Islamic extremism has increased; it is supported and partially funded by foreign organisations that propagate extremist ideology and violent extremist groups which use social networks in a very active way to propagate and recruit their followers. The data in this paper confi rms that more than 400 Kosovar men, women, and children have travelled to areas of armed confl ict in Syria and Iraq, having been recruited to fi ght for violent extremist groups. Therefore, the clear policies of the Government of the Republic of Kosovo addressed here suggest the government is aware of the seriousness of this threat which it is determined to prevent and combat this phenomenon by taking concrete steps in areas such as: legislative measures; mechanisms and planning for the prevention of and combat against terrorism as well as being proactive in the fi ght against terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational terrorism is a significant common problem for states in the Indo- Pacific region. This paper posits that a fundamental element of effective counterterrorism (CT) is cooperation, whether it is in the form of joint, interagency, multinational or a combination of each (JIM).1 Interoperability, in which two or more states act in a coordinated manner to address a common problem, facilitates a translation of policymaking rhetoric to operational responses to security threats. Improved interoperability will enhance regional CT cooperation at the strategic and tactical level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their paper "Educating for Tolerance in Kazakhstan" Shamshiya Rysbekova, Ainura Kurmanaliyeva and Karlygash Borbassova consider the problem of education intolerance amidst young people in the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors hope to unveil some of the controversies and problems encountered with regards to the prevention of terrorism and extremism and illuminate the efforts of Kazakhstan for international transparency and EU convergence. The paper begins with a revision of Kazakhstan law on the matter of religious freedom, registration of religious groups, and religious education. These topics have created great controversies in the international community, and the paper goes on to present some of the external reports on this matter, elaborated by various sources such as the United Nations, the European Community, and the United States, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) target detection utilizing multipath plays an important role in anti-terrorism, urban warfare, indoor rescue and intelligent driving. In this paper, an imaging method based on single-channel ultra-wideband (UWB) radar and dual-view observation is proposed for detecting NLOS targets. First, the cause of producing ghosts from a single view in a previous study is analyzed in detail. On this basis, with focusing on dual-view observation, the ghost problem is handled at two levels. From the level of the radar echo, path partition is conducted with the utilization of dual-view observation, solving the problem of uneven energy among multipaths. After that, two images are generated by multipath imaging, respectively, which reduces the accumulation of ghosts. From the level of the image, owing to the distinct distribution of ghosts between the imaging result, the ghosts at different locations are eliminated by image fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with single view and direct multipath imaging, the approach based on dual-view observation successfully eliminates most ghosts while retaining the targets in both single-target and double-targets scenarios, which verifies the effectiveness of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The active millimeter wave scanner has been widely used for detecting objects concealed underneath a person’s clothing in the field of security inspection and anti-terrorism. However, the active millimeter wave (AMMW) images always suffer from low signal-noise ratio, motion blur, and small size objects, making it challenging to detect concealed objects efficiently and accurately. The scanner usually captures a sequence of images in different views around a human body at once, while the existing algorithms only utilize the single image without considering the relationships among images. In this paper, we design a multi-source aggregation transformer (MATR) with two different attention mechanisms to model spatial correlations within an image and contextual interactions across images. Specifically, a self-attention module is introduced to encode local relationships between the region proposals in each image, while a cross-attention mechanism is built to focus on modeling the cross-correlations between different images. Besides, to handle the problem of small objects in size and suppress the noise in AMMW images, we present a selective context module (SCM). It designs a dynamic selection mechanism to enhance the high-resolution feature with spatial details and make it more distinguishable from the noisy background. Experiments on two AMMW image datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods lead to a remarkable improvement compared to previous state-of-the-art and will benefit the concealed object detection in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war against the Islamic State has seen some unusual alliances: the United States and European forces currently support the Kurdish positions in Bashur (Iraq) and Rojava (Syria). What would have been considered unlikely two years ago has, triggered by the threat potential of ISIS, become the most plastic show of neorealist concepts such as balance of power, alliance formation on the basis of shared enemy conceptions, and the relevance of geopolitical spheres of influence. This paper aims to uncover the reasons, consequences, and nature of the alliance between the United States, Turkey, the Syrian-Kurdish revolutionary movement PYD (Democratic Union Party), and the Iraq-Kurdish parties of the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) and PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). The guiding hypothesis of the paper understands the "state"to be an outdated concept for understanding the conflict. At the same time, this absence of centralstates and the multiplication of forces and actors can be seen as one trigger for increased Turkish assertion of strong-state postures both internally against the Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK) and externally against the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concept paper investigates possibilities to detect terrorist cells based on communications between individuals without the need for wiretapping. The advantages of such procedure are apparent: fewer (if any) legal requirements, and, most importantly, the possibility to automate the surveillance. After a brief review of the pertinent literature, we offer three approaches that are designed to aid in the detection of not only terrorist cells, but also the command structures within the cells. The techniques are demonstrated by using a small illustration. The paper concludes by outlining limitations of the procedures described here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we review POM‐based research related to prevention of terrorism. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) terrorist attacks have the potential to be prevented. Consequently, the focus of this study is on security enhancement and improving the resiliency of a nation to prevent terrorist attacks. Accordingly, we review articles from the 25 top journals, [following procedures developed by Gupta et al. (2016)], in the fields of Production and Operations Management, Operations Research, Management Science, and Supply Chain Management. In addition, we searched some selected journals in the fields of Information Sciences, Political Science, and Economics. This literature is organized and reviewed under the following seven core capabilities defined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): (1) Intelligence and Information Sharing, (2) Planning, (3) Interdiction and Disruption, (4) Screening, Search, and Detection, (5) Forensics and Attribution, (6) Public Information and Warning, and (7) Operational Coordination. We found that POM research on terrorism is primarily driven by the type of information that a defending country and a terrorist have about each other. Game theory is the main technique that is used in most research papers. Possible directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is both thrilling and frightening. The technology under this era would have an impact on mankind. The 4IR has the potentials of increasing income heights through new entrepreneur innovations. The new technologies under 4IR will improve productivity and reduce the cost of communication and transportation. On the one hand, there are numerous gains of the 4IR, on the other hand, there are also many challenges associated with it. With particular reference to security, it is feared that the 4IR could pave the way to greater insecurity, particularly when it is used by terrorists like Boko Haram to carry out their attacks. The main argument of this paper is that the non-deployment of 4IR technologies in countering Boko Haram terrorism is a major hindrance to Nigeria's war against terrorism. The major objective of this study is to investigate how the use of 4IR technologies have enhanced the activities of Boko Haram terrorist and Nigerian counterterrorism operatives. The data for this research were sourced through secondary sources and analyzed by the use of the qualitative method. The strategic theory was espoused as the framework of analysis. The research discovered that the sophistication in the activities of Boko Haram is bone out of the utilization of the 4IR technologies in their operations. The 4IR enable the terrorist to seek assistance from renowned terrorist groups and acquire state-of-the-art weapons and training. The paper further reveals that the Nigerian counterterrorism initiative is not effective in curbing the Boko Haram attacks partly because it is premised around the third industrial revolution technologies. This research recommends 4IR technology compliance as the first step to match the Boko Haram onslaught before the use of soft power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In counter-terrorism actions, commanders are confronted with difficult and important challenges. Their decision-making processes follow military instructions and must consider the humanitarian aspect of the mission. In this paper, we aim to respond to the question: What would the casualties be if governmental forces reacted in a given way with given resources? Within a similar context, decision-support systems are required due to the variety and complexity of modern attacks as well as the enormous quantity of information that must be treated in real time. The majority of mathematical models are not suitable for real-time events. Therefore, we propose an analytical model for a time-dependent prediction of terrorist attacks (ATiPreTA). The output of our model is consistent with casualty data from two important terrorist events known in Tunisia: Bardo and Sousse attacks. The sensitivity and experimental analyses show that the results are significant. Some operational insights are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Masyarakat, Kebudayaan & Politik is the property of Universitas Airlangga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is a preliminary examination of the newly established Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism (IMAFT). IMAFT's membership includes Arab and Muslim states in the continents of Asia and Africa, and encompasses considerable military capabilities. The paper assumes that the advent of the Islamic Military Alliance is a significant event for both academic and empirical reasons, and employs insights gleaned from the International Relations literature on military alliances to analyse its structure, mission and politics. The discussion maintains that IMAFT sufficiently reflects the main conceptual aspects of military alliances, aims at performing vital collective security functions, and involves some of the immediate and potential issues typically associated with alliance politics. While the emerging alliance is yet to evolve towards institutionalised norms and procedures, the analysis shows that IMAFT is relevant for regional security politics and potentially conducive to addressing the growing global threat of terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines multiple sources of Islamic State (IS) terrorist group's funding and some counter-mechanisms deployed by the global anti-IS coalition. The paper analyses: a) how IS exploits the volatile political situations and security vulnerabilities across the Middle East and North Africa to generate funding and b) exposes the dichotomy between the terrorist group's religious rhetoric and its criminal enterprises. The paper aims to help counter-terrorism practitioners and scholars generate counternarrative responses to enhance the efficacy of a state's counter terrorism (CT) and counter violent extremism (CVE) strategies against IS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of residential broadband connections and Internet-enabled home devices have driven the success of many useful applications such as video streaming and remote healthcare. However, poorly managed routers and connected devices in the home are vulnerable under persistent threats and exploitations from cyber attackers across the Internet who continuously identify, compromise, and control devices as part of botnets for launching click fraud, denial of service attacks, spam campaigns. These growing threats and broad damages have made it imperative to understand, characterize, filter, and reduce exploit traffic towards millions of home routers and billions of connected devices in the home. This paper presents a bloom-filter based analytics framework to capture persistent threats towards the same home routers and to identify correlated attacks towards distributed home networks. Our experimental results based on network traffic collected from real homes over 18months have revealed a number of interesting findings on persistent and correlated threats towards home networks, which calls for improved security and management of home networks. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first effort to characterize cyber threats towards home networks and to propose a simple and yet effective approach to identify persistent and aggressive attacks towards home networks. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between ISIS propaganda content and ISIS-inspired attacks by those outside of the group's control. We examine the content of ISIS' English language magazines, as well as speeches by two of its top leaders. We find that statements made about enemy countries in most contexts are not associated with a higher likelihood of violence in those countries. However, when a country is mentioned in ISIS propaganda in the context of its participation in the air campaign, this corresponds to an increased likelihood that the country will experience a violent attack. This suggests that propaganda highlighting key military adversaries may play a role in directing attackers that are outside the control of the organization's hierarchy to the group's preferred targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acts of terrorism and violent extremism have become rampant in the recent past not only in Pakistan but worldwide. Efforts are on the way to counter terrorism and violent extremism. Mostly such efforts focus on the role of men while neglecting the role of half of the population i.e. the women. Women are influential in families, the workplace, institutions and communities so their role is very important. Acts of terrorism and violent extremism cannot be countered only by law enforcement agencies but by building social capacity to make such acts and actors unacceptable in society. In Pakistan's context, Muslim women can play a very important role in achieving this purpose. Research has shown that women are the first respondents to extremist behaviour. They can play a very effective role in the prevention of the radicalization of young minds. While designing antiterrorism and antiviolence policies gender perspectives should be brought into consideration. Women empowerment can play a key role in identifying extremist behaviour and in the prevention of radicalization of young individuals. This research paper will analyze the role of women in countering terrorism and violent extremism and will propose a course for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The through-wall detection and classification of human activities are critical for anti-terrorism, security, and disaster rescue operations. An effective through-wall detection and classification technology is proposed for finer-grained human activities such as piaffe, picking up an object, waving, jumping, standing with random micro-shakes, and breathing while sitting. A stepped-frequency continuous wave (SFCW) bio-radar sensor is first used to conduct through-wall detection of finer-grained human activities; Then, a comprehensive range accumulation time-frequency transform (CRATFR) based on inverse weight coefficients is proposed, which aims to strengthen the micro-Doppler features of finer activity signals. Finally, in combination with the effective eigenvalues extracted from the CRATFR spectrum, an optimal self-adaption support vector machine (OS-SVM) based on prior human position information is introduced to classify different finer-grained activities. At a fixed position (3 m) behind a wall, the classification accuracies of six activities performed by eight individuals were 98.78% and 93.23%, respectively, for the two scenarios defined in this paper. In the position-changing experiment, an average classification accuracy of 86.67% was obtained for five finer-grained activities (excluding breathing) of eight individuals within 6 m behind the wall for the most practical scenario, a significant improvement over the 79% accuracy of the current method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Journal of Middle Eastern Studies / Türkiye Ortadoğu Çalışmaları Dergisi is the property of Sakarya University, Middle East Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Changes in security environment after the end of Cold War and 9/11 have strongly affected our security concepts and paradigms. In the field of counter-terrorism, a serious conceptual and practical debate on the relationship between security and human rights and freedoms has begun. The goal of this paper is to reflect on this complex relationship at the conceptual level and introduce the empirical debate on this relationship in the field of civil aviation (case of introducing body scanners). The paper's results show that the concept of human security usefully integrates the care for human rights and security of individuals. The debate on the potential introduction of body scanners on the European airports was actually a debate on the ways of providing individual human security on the airports with simultaneous concern for other human rights. The output of this debate was a compromise: body scanners can be used at the discretion of individual airports and member states, but are not an obligatory measure on all European airports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Endless armed conflicts against terrorist groups put civilian populations at risk. Since France has been involved in the Sahel from 2013 onwards, transnational non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) of extended geographical and temporal scope against groups designated as terrorists are not a US exception anymore. NIACs against terrorist groups, conducted not only by the United States but also by France, persist and have been reconfigured around threat anticipation. How can anticipatory warfare be best constrained? This article argues that it can be best done through more constraining rules regulating target selection in NIACs and, in particular, by redefining the notion of continuous combat function (CCF). Many elements explored in this article indicate that the United States and France select targets that they pre-designate as terrorists, before these targets are engaged in hostilities. Instead of responding to the observed participation of these individuals in hostilities, strikes are based on contextual and behavioural elements ahead or outside of such moments. This paper argues that when war consists of threat anticipation, it becomes very extensive and particularly risky for civilians. Furthermore, recent State practice in the counterterrorism context reveals the pitfalls of the notions of direct participation in hostilities and CCF as defined in the 2009 International Committee of the Red Cross Interpretive Guidance. Outside this context, the interpretations proposed in the Interpretive Guidance might seem sufficient to constrain target selection processes and to protect civilian populations. However, when applied to armed conflicts that are driven by threat anticipation, the pitfalls of these interpretations emerge. I formulate a critique of these interpretations as being partly responsible for anticipatory warfare and propose an alternative theory for the CCF test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]