Organized Crime

The face of organized crime is continually changing, yet its foundation has remained the same over many years. One of the distinguishing features of organized crime is in the challenge to clearly define it, which impacts on the implementation of transnational prevention and control policies. Although organized crime is as much disorganized as it is organized, it does feature specific characteristics. In order to understand organized crime, it must be viewed as a social process and a community social institution. Organized crime is, in its nature, highly adaptable to opportunities that major incidents, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, bring. © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The prospects of strategic imagination in explaining international security challenges.

This paper will study the potential applicability of the strategic imagination method to international security analysis, which has been previously used to improve prognostic quality in business studies. The method should allow security experts to think about the future by considering "what if" situations, and creatively assess the probability of different threats, even those that appear as improbable to others. The components of the method include strategic fit (the actor's competence between its abilities and the needs of market), structure (the degree of concentration and maturity), competitive advantages (the extent to which the resources denied to the competition can be gathered, for example, access to novel technology), and strategic focus (i.e., on cost advantages, a differentiated product or exploitation of a market niche), in which a strategic advantage can be obtained by changing rules or deliberately creating turbulence. Strategic imagination can promote an academic discussion on changing nature of global processes like the emergence of global security market and provide nonorthodox methods for advancing a qualitative security analysis. Educated forecasting by connecting today's developments with strategic imagination offers an important component in building successful security strategies and supportive public policies, especially in what concerns psychological warfare. For example, in the current COVID-19 crisis, main efforts have been made to defend against its national consequences (e.g., various restrictions introduced by individual countries), and less attention has been paid to cooperative strategies that can significantly reduce the global spread of the virus.

Zone balancing: India and the Quad's new strategic logic

When a state faces a rising great power rival, it has a range of balancing options from which to choose. But a balancing state may consider many of the most common options to be either too costly or unduly provocative. Thus India, for example, considered 2020 to be a strategic watershed—with a clearly more aggressive China on the border, and a clearly more disorderly international system after the COVID pandemic—but has undertaken only modest military balancing. What alternative options do such erstwhile balancers have? This article addresses both those theoretical and empirical puzzles, by introducing the novel concept of 'zone balancing' as another option in a balancing state's repertoire. Zone balancing seeks to shape the international field of competition in which the balancer and rival operate—specifically, to build the capacity and resilience of third-party states, to shrink the rival's ability to coerce them. This article advances that concept and uses it to explain India's post-2020 strategic adjustment, and especially its warmer embrace of the Quad—the minilateral grouping comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States. Zone balancing effectively explains the Quad's recently-clarified strategic logic, and predicts some of its limitations. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Securitization of COVID-19 as a Security Norm: WHO Norm Entrepreneurship and Norm Cascading

In this article, we analyze the emergence of a global security norm of the COVID-19 epidemic as a threat to international security. This crisis is one of the gravest crises that humanity has experienced since the end of World War II in terms of the number of people infected and died, but also in terms of the economic consequences. Here, we provide a framework for understanding the securitization of the COVID-19 epidemic as an international norm defined and promoted by the World Health Organization as a norm entrepreneur, and cascaded down to the level of member states. We identify the actors who developed the main strategic prescriptions of the security norm and the international mechanisms that promoted the cascading of its contents throughout the international system. We further develop the notion of primary and secondary norms, which explain the striking differences amongst industrialized states with regard to the contents, scope, and implementation timeline of the various measures aiming to curb the spread of the virus. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social Sciences (2076-0760) is the property of MDPI 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 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 . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Editörden

Prof. Dr. Göktürk TÜYSÜZOĞLU evaluates Kosovo foreign policy in the framework of Small State Approach by applying to the neoclassical realism theory of International Relations. Prof. Dr. Gültekin K. BÍRLÍK discusses the foreign policy implemented by Turkey during the Spanish civil war as an example of the implementation of the Peace Principle in the foreign policy of Atatürk period. [...]Dr. Arda Özkan reviewed Michael E. Smith's book "International Security" for this issue of our Journal.

Crisis of Trust: The Search for New Approaches to Nuclear Arms Control

Sevostyanov and Mizin focus on the search of new approaches to nuclear arms control. The outbreak in 2020 of the coronavirus pandemic coincided with a sharp deterioration in relations between Russia and the leading NATO countries, headed by the US. Officials and experts have started expressing fears about the possibility of an armed conflict between the parties. In this situation, arms control measures are especially important, starting with measures to ensure confidence and stability. The assertion that the arms control process is the most important factor in strengthening international security and that the very survival and well-being of humanity depend on its success has become widespread among politicians and experts.

Post-COVID Transformation: DOD Goes into the Matrix

These are complex, turbulent, and uncertain times to be sure. The Department of Defense (DOD) is at an important inflection point. COVID-19 has irrevocably altered the dynamics of international security and reshaped DODs decision-making landscape. As a result, DOD will have to adapt to significantly different strategic circumstances post-COVID than those assumed operative in the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS18). We recommend that DOD recognize this to be true, seize the initiative, create opportunity from crisis, and recraft defense strategy to re-emerge from COVID as a stronger, more hypercompetitive institution.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2020

This review examines Australian foreign policy for July to December 2020 through the framework of uncertainty. It argues that the Morrison government's handling of relations with China and its significant defence boost with the Defence Strategic Update signal a desire to placate various domestic pressures while at the same time responding to international tensions over security under an unpredictable Trump administration. At the same time, elements of Morrison's “negative” and “positive” globalism guided Australia's response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, with consequences for regional aid and diplomatic soft power. Foreign policy initiatives during this period, while sending positive optics, were undercut by a lack of a consolidated vision to ensure policy effectiveness. Wrestling aspects of “negative” and “positive” globalism also suggests that foreign policy under Morrison is at times contradictory in its interpretation of the national interest. This is especially prevalent on the question of climate change, which Morrison soon had to contend with as an incoming Biden administration promised ambitious goals in this area.

Pandemic and Regional Disintegration: COVID-19 and the Dismantling of the South American Security Community

The article analyzes the development of a security community in South America and the impact that the coronavirus pandemic had on it. By using a constructivist methodology, the paper analyzes how the crisis of regionalism, the difficulty in defining common threats and the erosion of a collective identity hampered the maturation of the community. In this context, it is argued that the health crisis caused by COVID-19 gave rise to a securitization process that deepened the process of dismantling that com-munity and was reflected in three indicators: 1) the proliferation of discourses that identify neighbors as a threat to safety and health;2) a fortification of the borders;3) an increase in the militarization of citizen security and other spheres of the public arena. It is concluded that this type of practice and discourse gives rise to a type of political community similar to an an-archic society, where states identify themselves as rivals rather than friends.

The SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic as a Global Risk: Inequality and Human Insecurity

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has questioned the dominant international security strategies, and also highlighted the immense contradictions in our global way of life. From a human security perspective, this investigation analyses the pandemic as a risk and threat to social life on a global scale. The conceptual categories of human security and global risk are used to understand the inequalities, structural violence and vulnerabilities that accompany the health emergency and make it a total social crisis. Some of the main risk trends that the pandemic represents are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. It is proposed that the global pandemic is leading to the suppression of the loopholes of security and certainty provided by modernity, whose contradictions have led us to suffer the most important planetary catastrophe in recent history. Likewise, the pandemic has shown that the strategies anchored to traditional security are not the most appropriate to face the consequences that the current health crisis will have. Therefore, to respond to these risks and threats, it is essential to develop new perspectives on security.

The consequence of COVID-19: how the United States moved from security provider to security consumer.

Deliberations over the COVID-19 pandemic's long-term effects on the global balance of power have spurred a large and rancorous debate, including speculation about a shift in the definition of national security and prescriptions about where it should focus. That argument will no doubt continue. But we argue that one consequence is already evident: the United States has spent the last seventy years portraying itself as a security provider in all key domains-for many an intrinsic component of its status as a global leader. One reasonable broad conclusion from the US struggle with COVID-19 is that it has further forfeited its broad leadership position on the basis of its behaviour. Yet that, although possibly true, would only portray one element of the story. The more profound insight exposed by COVID-19 is of a new reality: in a world where both naturogenic and anthropogenic threats pose immense national security challenges, decades of mistaken assumptions and policy choices have created a new environment, one where the United States has been redefined as a security consumer, at least in terms of international public health issues associated with the spread of deadly infectious diseases.