Disunity in Global Jihad

Authoritarian systems are based on intelligence and state security services protecting the 'state,' if not the people. But what happens to them once the totalitarian state goes out of business? This special issue of Connections looks at successful and promising transitions and transformations towards the democratic Rule of Law and seeks to establish commonalities in the transition processes.

The Fall 2020 issue of Connections: The Quarterly Journal presents a variety of security-related applications of the concept of resilience. Two articles address the relation to cybersecurity – one presenting a framework for assessing national cyber resilience, and the other the need to enhance the resilience of the armed forces to cyberattacks as one of the tools for hybrid warfare.

The Summer 2020 issue of Connections: The Quarterly Journal is dedicated to the concept of resilience, its evolution from the field of engineering, through psychology and to the ubiquitous referencing to resilience in numerous security and defense policy documents. The first article provides an excellent overview of this evolution and highlights the main points of friction between theory and practice. It is followed by presentation of a simple structure of the concept, yet with anticipation of its high utility.

This issue of Connections. The Quarterly Journal looks into a number of issues: professional military education and its role in deepening defense capabil­ities with a special focus on the South Caucasus, the defense cooperation of the South Caucasus nations with both Russia and NATO which may result in a new form of a ‘Great Game’ rivalry between the cooperation partners, the specific ‘military school culture’ of the Dr.

COVID-19 caught most international security academics by surprise. Initial articles featured the role of China and Russia in the pandemic. As of April 2020, Marshall Center faculty members and befriended academics of the Partnership for Peace Consortium started to write how Beijing and Moscow were trolling Europe's public with disinformation, propagandistic aid campaigns, and winkingly promoting authoritarian ways as superior to western models in handling a crisis.

Digitalization made our societies and admed forces vulnerable to cyber threats, turning cyber defense into a natural task for all defense organizations. This issue of Connections: The Quarterly Journal looks into the experience of Austria, Germany, Israel, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, providing valuable examples of policies, doctrinal aspects, organization and procedures the military applies to counter cyber threats.

This special edition of Connections focuses on the security, integration, and future of the Balkans. The edition examines the internal and external factors shaping the region. Issues as diverse as nationalism, the role of organized crime, malign foreign interference, and EU / NATO integration are comprehensively examined. This special edition aims to provide insights for a broad audience—including students, the military, and policy makers—of the challenges and especially the potential of the Balkans region over the next decade and beyond.

At the threshold of its third year, Russia's large-scale and brutal war against Ukraine continues to kill thousands, terrorize millions of Ukrainians, and disrupt international supply chains, affecting global energy and food markets. This is the second journal issue dedicated to the ongoing war. It dwells on the issue of lustration -- a problem Ukraine did not effectively address during its post-communist transition, which in turn led to the perpetuation of the Kremlin's ideology and, thus, its continuous influence on Ukrainian politics and society.

This issue of Connections delves into pressing security challenges of global significance: The role of pre-Internet social networks on the growth of civilizations, what small nations can learn from non-profits to enhance defense acquisition, the evolving landscape of hybrid warfare, exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and cyber-social vulnerabilities, the growing cyber threats to maritime industries, the propagation of radicalism via social media, and the evolution of the international perceptions of the Taliban.