Security and Defence Quarterly

3-20

Authors: Nikolay Nichev

Social security and social entrepreneurship are subject to special attention from the European Commission (EC), particularly in recent years. This is due to their potential to find solutions to society’s problems related to the creation of sustainable jobs, facilitating social and occupational integration, provision of social services and improving the quality of life, including the fight against poverty and social exclusion. The current paper analyses the main strategic and policy documents supporting social security and social entrepreneurship development in Bulgaria.

35-50

Authors: Radosław Bielawski, Aleksandra Radomska

One form of activity in cyberspace is the information battle. One of the proposed definitions will define it as a negative co–operation in the sphere of information acquisition, information distortion and information defense, where each side of the action is subordinated to the antagonistic side of the other. It leads to the achievement of political objectives and is aimed at overthrowing the systems of the state responsible for the state of its security. It is important that this condition is at a high, or at least acceptable, level. To ensure this level, it is important to define cybersecurity fighting models that are adequate for the threats and to determine their impact on the level of national security risk in cyberspace. Literature on the subject contains many models of cyberwarfare information that have been shaped in recent years. However, there is no assessment of the adequacy of these models for the risks and risks associated with national security threats. It should be noted that information security itself, as part of national security, is variable. New threats are emerging and, at a very high rate and with high activity in cyberspace, they are capable of destabilising the security of key state administration bodies, military facilities and other important state– run infrastructures. It should be emphasised that existing cyberspace fighting information models are not universal and cannot be used for any type of threat to national security. They need to find, organise and evaluate those that would be the most appropriate not only for national security threats but also for geopolitical determinants. Assumptions for the research and its results are a noticeable increase in the number of cyberattacks, some of which are important from the point of view of national security – the military system and critical infrastructure elements of the state. The following subject of the research was adopted in the article – models of information fight, related to threats to national security coming from / to cyberspace. The purpose of scientific research is to define models of information combat and to determine the suitability and evaluation of these models for the purpose of evaluating the risks of national security threats. Identifying the subject and objectives of the research led to a general research question: What appropriate models of information fight in cyberspace can be defined and used for the risks of national security threats? The research method applied theoretical methods (analysis, synthesis, generalisation, abstraction, inference, analogy and comparison) as well as the empirical method of dialogue and the method of participant observation.

69-90

Authors: Magdalena El Ghamari

The fight that Europe and the West must wage against jihadist terrorism will take some time, but if we live up to our values of integration and democracy, we will come out of it soon. As Giovanni Falcone, the Italian judge killed by the Mafia, once said about the Mafia: “It is a human phenomenon, and as all human phenomena has a start and an evolution, it will have also an end”. Jihadis have been using Twitter at least since 2010, with the Shabaab joining the site in December 2011, but never before to this extent. One early adapter of Twitter, the Afghan Taliban, began to establish their social media presence in December 2010, through which they issued brief bulletins about their actions and alerts for forthcoming communiqués. Many of the most prominent jihadi groups have followed the same path, including the Shabaab al-Mujahideen, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The content of these Twitter accounts has tended to closely mirror material released to jihadi forums. For example, the Afghan Taliban may post the text of a communiqué to their website, to a jihadi forum, and to the Twitter account of one of their spokesmen. Mirroring jihadi groups, elements of the online jihadi community have also migrated to social media sites, with prominent forums such as Shumukh al-Islam and Ansar al- Mujahideen English Forum creating Twitter accounts to publicise notable releases and discussions. Concurrently, many individual jihadis and jihadi supporters have joined Twitter, enthusiastically circulating propaganda among themselves and promoting it to potential recruits. Yet, the benefits conferred by social networking come with a substantial cost: social networking platforms can sow great confusion if known official accounts are deleted and re-established or if there are multiple accounts claiming to represent a specific jihadi group. In order to reach the new official accounts, followers must be able to distinguish the legitimate social media accounts of jihadi groups from non-authenticated users, which is a level of ambiguity that is not found on jihadi forums.