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The aim of this paper is a review of the conceptualization of national interest in the theoretical assumptions of realism. A review of the literature and its analysis provides an overview of the main findings of prominent realists who shaped the national interest and created a solid foundation for future research: Hans Morgentau, Raymond Aron, and Kenneth Waltz. Consequently, the scientific goals of this paper are to summarize the scope and manner of national interest’s thematization in realist’s research and, to analyze the significance of their scientific contribution to the Science of Security. National interest remains one of the most important terms in Security Science. A prudent articulation of national interests is a key factor for the security of any state, so understanding this concept is extremely important for Security Science theorists. A realistic understanding of the national interest as a key driver, but also a determinant of the behavior of states concerning other states, is still relevant today.

Although as old as politics itself, terrorism as an international security problem has not yet received its unique definition. The purpose of this paper is to consider the necessity having a generally accepted definition of terrorism in the form of political violence as the basis on which terrorism will find its place in international criminal law. The first part of the paper is dedicated to the general consideration of international criminal law and the International Criminal Court. The second part of the paper examines the existing definitions of terrorism and analyzes terrorism as a crime in international criminal law. Terrorism has long transcended national borders and is no longer a threat only to sovereign states but also to international peace and the security of both the individual and society as a whole. With the expansion of terrorism and increasingly brutal ways of expressing this type of crime, there is a need for even closer international criminal cooperation of sovereign states in the development of legal mechanisms for the prevention and punishment of perpetrators of these criminal acts. By reviewing relevant literature concerning itself with such topics and comparing different understandings of the concept of terrorism from legal, political, and security science sources, we conclude that clarifying the definition of terrorism as an international security problem will, lead to its complete characterization as an international criminal act.

Cyberspace has become an indispensable part in which special operations such as cyber war or warfare take place. The role of special war as the use of so-called soft power was emphasized. The country's number of potential adversaries in cyber warfare is unlimited, making highly endangered aspects of cyber civilian infrastructure, which is essentially military readiness, including the mobilization of forces through the civilian sector, also a likely target. A special type of cyber war or warfare is hybrid warfare. This type of warfare is increasingly resorted to because it is extremely cheaper than the conventional method of warfare and at the same time brings exceptional results. The first thing that affects cyber security policy analysts comes with the issue of neutrality, as well as the huge variety of assessments about future attack and defense technologies. There is also a consideration that the new (problematic) cyber technology will be deployed in a short period of time, in time periods, in just a few days in terms of warnings. Second, is the trends in cyber-attack and defense technologies and who is following those processes. Third, decision making technology having in mind high-performance computers, technologies that are well known, although rapidly evolving, are increasingly seen as a basic means of managing cyber defense at the national military and security level, as well as a new weapon in the hands of opponents. Fourth, role of intelligence in planning future scenarios for defense against hybrid or any other cyber threat/s.

351.74:004.738.5 004.6.056 DOI: https://doi.org/10.37458/ssj.1.1.1 Received: January 29, 2020 Accepted: May 26, 2020 The paper argues the facts that the growth and expansion of its domain, in combination with its own procedures and methodologies, justifies the existence of Security Science. The paper starts with the global opinion overview of security as a scientific discipline. With the focus on technological segments, a possible scientific approach to security analysis (SA) is presented in detail. Finally, examples are provided regarding the use of mathematics modelling and tools for data analysis and interpretation in security domain.

Securitization of religion, or consideration of religion within the context of the security sector, has returned to the Slovak and Serbian context in connection with the migration crisis. This paper is mostly theoretical, and the question of religious identity is categorized under the sector of societal security. Unlike other conflicts of identity, religion is polarizing, and religious conflicts feature the destruction of cultural heritage and religious monuments. Religious conflicts can be observed among both believers of different religious groups as well as among different denominations of one particular religion. The last section deals with the particular cases of Artsakh and Northern Ireland. In the former conflict, nationalism and overlapping territorial claims play a key role, but the later conflict can be better understood as a hierarchical ethnic conflict.

Proper operation of Critical Infrastructure (CI) is by definition of high importance for a region, nation or even several countries connected in some way. The term and idea of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) has to do with the preparedness and response to serious incidents that might influence the operation of CI. In Europe, the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) refers to the doctrine or specific programs created as a result of the European Commission’s directive EU COM(2006) 786 which designates European critical infrastructure that, in case of fault, incident, or attack, could impact both the country where it is hosted and at least one other European Member State. Member states are obliged to adopt the 2006 directive into their national statutes. [1]

This Article points to key elements of Critical Infrastructure Resilience (CIR) and how they differ from Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). CIP is still very important and one of the key systems that the society relies upon to ensure the continuity of operation of CI. However, CIP cannot predict an adequate number of major threats that would allow to conduct the preparedness and response at the level which would ensure the sufficient operation of CI in all cases. In that sense CIR sets a new paradigm with a quality that reduces vulnerability, minimizes the consequences of threats, accelerates response and recovery, and facilitates adaptation to a disruptive event. Some selected concepts of CIR with examples are presented in the Article that should assist in further development and enhancement of resilience of subsystems and infrastructures as a whole, resulting in more secure CI.

Hybrid warfare is a significant threat to National Security and Countries in last 10 years. Hybrid activities are not new, but environment of cyberspace is completely different than before. We are witnessing a great expansion of the aforementioned fifth combat space, which knows no borders, fences, social or cultural barriers. Hybrid war as a form of endangering the security of sovereign states is primarily based on subversive activities in order to paralyze the state apparatus with the ultimate goal of changing the political leadership. This change of political leadership in the earlier period of history was far simpler and most often began and ended with armed aggression, the use of armed rebellion, or a coup. As modern societies increasingly turn to reliable alliances, mechanisms of collective security, conventional methods have become for quite some time less effective and outdated. The use of disinformation as an integral method of Hybrid Warfare has its roots in the concept of "ideological subversion". Ideological subversion is a term firstly defined by KGB in 1970th. KGB invented “Ideological subversion” as a tool of special warfare against civilians and administrative employees. To make it easier to follow the case study, the authors of the Hybrid War operation divide it into four phases: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Stabilization. For Russia, the Balkans hold significant historic, cultural, and religious connections—shared ties that are actively propagated, and at times exaggerated, by Russian public diplomacy efforts and media narratives.

Over time, terrorism has evolved into different forms. One of the most dangerous is certainly cyber terrorism. There are many different motivations for terrorists to deploy cyber terrorism as a tool in their fight. Internet and computer networks are powerful resources on which contemporary society relies heavily. Terrorist groups have developed new tools and methods of the fight and they have become more effective, efficient, and unpredictable. Virtual, or cyberspace, is perfect and very safe ground for terrorist groups’ various activities, such are secret encrypted communication, file sharing, indoctrination and recruitment of vulnerable individuals, fundraising and promotions of their future actions and accomplishments spreading fear among common people. Are we adequately aware of these facts and prepared for countermeasures? The fact is that terrorists use mostly open-source tools (software) for their purposes, widely available and free of charge, as well as video games, popular social networks (mostly Twitter), and software developed by their programmers. The purpose of this paper is to point out some of the methods radical Islamic terrorist groups have been using and underline the importance of responding to this new security challenge.

This study introduces the Multi-Type Maximal Covering Location Problem (MTMCLP) that arises from the design of emergency service networks, and represents a generalization of the well-known Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP). Differently from the basic MCLP, several types of incidents and emergency units are considered and hierarchy of emergency units of different types is assumed in the MTMCLP. The numbers of available emergency units of each type are limited to some constants. The objective of the MTMCLP is to choose locations for establishing emergency units of each type, such that the total number of covered incidents is maximized. In order to provide a decision maker with optimal solutions in an efficient manner, a two-phase optimization approach to the MTMCLP is designed. In the first phase, a variant of Reduced Variable Neighborhood Search (RVNS) is applied to quickly find a high-quality solution. The obtained RVNS solution is used as a good starting point for the Linear Programming method in the second phase, which returns the optimal solution to the MTMCLP. All constructive elements of the proposed two-phase method, denoted as RVNS-LP, are adapted to the characteristics of the considered problem. The RVNS-LP approach is evaluated on real-life instances obtained from two networks of police units in Montenegro and Serbia, and randomly generated test instances of larger dimensions. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed RVNS-LP reached all optimal solutions on all real-life test instances in very short CPU time. On generated test instances, the RVNS-LP also returned optimal solutions in all cases, within short running times and significant time savings compared to CPLEX solver. The mathematical model and the proposed two-phase optimization method may be applicable in the design and management of various emergency-service networks.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.46.1.13853

Corporate governance is a complex process that represents a relatively new concept in the countries in transition, as is the case in the Balkans. A particularly important phenomenon is that of company managers, running state-property companies, mostly in the company’s success, but largely invested in their personal gain and self-promotion. It is often the case that they sign detrimental contracts for their own profit, therefore, jeopardize, and weaken the entire economic system of a country, which represents a serious security risk. Modern cooperative governance assumes an entire set of security measures that have to be undertaken in respect to the degree of threats that may jeopardize the profit and success of a company.

The decade-long armed conflict in the Balkans from 1991 to 2001, greatly misrepresented in the Western public, were the biggest defeat for the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, a great defeat for Europe - but a victory for global jihad. Radical Islamists used the wars to recruit a large number of Sunni Muslims in the Balkans (Bosnian and Herzagovina and Albanian) for the cause of political Islam and militant Jihad. Converts to Wahhabi Islam not only provide recruits for the so-called “White Al-Qaeda,” but also exhibit growing territorial claims and seek the establishment of a “Balkan Caliphate.” Powers outside the Balkans regard this with indifference or even tacit approval. Radical Islamist activity is endangering the security of not only Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and BosniaHerzegovina, but also Europe and the world.

In this paper, we propose a mathematical model that arises from the problem of establishing the network of Police Special Forces Units (PSFUs) for high-risk law enforcement operations. The goal of the considered problem is to locate certain number of PSFUs at the nodes of a given network, in order to minimize the maximal load of an established emergency unit. The uncertainty of the number of criminal acts and other conditions that arise from practice are considered. We propose a robust integer programming formulation of the problem that allows controlling the degree of conservatism of the solution in terms of probabilistic bounds on constraint violation. We present computational results obtained by CPLEX solver for the set of real-life test instances including 165 cities and 234 potential PSFU sites in the Republic of Serbia. We examine the impact of different protection levels on the objective value and the tradeoff between the probability of constraint violation and solution’s optimality. The CPLEX solv...

Modern security studies, facing new challenges, should have a curriculum that provides graduates with the knowledge and skills on the basis of which they can excel in their professional activities. Anyone who influences and/or prepares the security education curriculum should be aware of the true needs of students, so they can apply the acquired knowledge in practice. First of all, the curriculum creators should put themselves in the position of professionals and, in the content of the curriculum, provide answers as to which courses and knowledge would be most useful in the case of major security crises such as wars, various intensity conflicts and massive rebellions, particularly those that have an inner or extra ethnic component or an inner national dimension in a pan-national joint political movement, such as the so-called Arab Spring. The latter encompasses the area of security, discourse in the international humanitarian law, particularly the Law of Armed Conflict and Rules of Engagement, but also the extremely delicate matters of religion, belief, faith, language (separately and all together in a wider sociological context), and above all, the Arab Spring as a social and security phenomenon presenting a unique sample for security studies both at the global and regional level due to the geopolitical trends in past two decades. Sodoben varnostni študij, ki se sooča z vedno novimi izzivi, potrebuje učne načrte, ki diplomantom zagotavljajo znanje in veščine, na podlagi katerih se lahko odlikujejo pri opravljanju svojega poklica. Vsi, ki pripravljajo učne načrte za varnostni študij ali imajo vpliv na njihovo pripravo, se morajo zavedati resničnih potreb študentov, ki morajo pridobljeno znanje uporabiti v praksi. Ustvarjalci učnih načrtov bi se najprej morali postaviti v položaj strokovnjakov in znotraj učnega načrta odgovoriti na vprašanje, kateri predmeti in znanje so najbolj koristni ob večjih varnostnih krizah, kot so vojne, konflikti različnih intenzivnosti in množični upori, zlasti tisti, ki vključujejo notranjo in zunanjo narodnostno komponento ali notranjo nacionalno razsežnost v okviru vsenacionalnega skupnega političnega gibanja, kot je tako imenovana arabska pomlad. Njeno razumevanje zahteva poznavanje področja varnosti, diskurz o mednarodnem humanitarnem pravu, zlasti o pravu oboroženih spopadov in pravilih delovanja, ter o izredno občutljivih vprašanjih vere, prepričanja in jezika (posamično in skupaj v širšem sociološkem kontekstu), predvsem pa je treba arabsko pomlad obravnavati kot družbeni in varnostni pojav, ki zaradi geopolitičnih trendov v zadnjih dveh desetletjih predstavlja enkraten primer za varnostne študije tako na globalni kot na regionalni ravni.

This chapter provides an overview of the current situation with critical infrastructure (CI) resilience in the Republic of Serbia, with an emphasis on the possibilities for utilizing the social behaviour in improving CI resilience through the cyber component. It argues that the response to an incident and its impact, as the critical phase in estimating, defining and improving resilience, could play a critical role in enhancing and providing guidance for the CI security in Serbia. To provide a necessary platform, CI resilience should be a main pillar of the new contemporary Law about Critical Infrastructure. On the other hand, the cyber segment is the fastest growing component of CI, making it extremely important for resilience-based CI safeguarding. The pace of technological improvements in the cyber area is not adequately followed by most of its users and their behaviour, making the human factor a constantly growing risk that often renders even the most advanced technological protection measures obsolete. Therefore the strengthening of the social component, followed by appropriate legislation, could provide the required edge in improving the overall resilience of critical infrastructures as the ultimate target.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are taking an increasingly important part in teaching, learning, and communication between all the participants in the educational process. Inspired by numerous examples of successful implementation of the ICTs in the constructivist, problem-based learning situations, in this article the authors present a powerful educational and practical tool: the Terrorist and Organized Criminal Search (TOC-s) database. It is a dynamic database that offers comprehensive information on global terrorist network and helps researchers, analysts, students, and others working to prevent terrorism. It is the result of a joint project realized by the Faculty of Security Studies and Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, with the support of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. Through the TOC-s project, the authors have successfully unified the perspectives of help seeking and information searching, within the context of ICT-based learning situation. An online collaboration learning environment is designed to facilitate students in group collaboration and to coordinate and monitor the learning process. Besides its educational function, the TOC-s database has important applicative role in the national security system as the additional powerful measure in protecting state borders.

Constellation of threats to international security makes more complex the further fact that the conflicts of great and regional powers itself contain the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. In this geopolitical turmoil raises the question about the fate of small countries. Southeast Europe is for many years epicenter of events in terms of energy policy and energy security, and it is evident that these trends will continue. Russian cancellation of the South Stream, as well as the US intention to build a South corridor gas pipeline in the area of Southeast Europe, represents a new strategic challenge to the security of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the whole southeastern Europe.