Kryminalizacja finansowania terroryzmu w świetle przepisu art. 165a kodeksu karnego. Część 1

Progressing globalization, ease of movement and the pace of information flow undoubtedly have intensified the threat of an important social problem — terrorism. An key instrument of combating terrorist activity is counteracting its financing. This article will analyze the crime of financing terrorism, which has been typified in Art. 165a of the Polish Criminal Code. An attempt will be made to answer the question of whether the legislative measures taken in the above-mentioned scope are purposeful, necessary and justified. The genesis of the current legal regulations in the field of counteracting the financing of terrorism in the Polish penal code will be also presented.

Terrorism in the Modern World-System: Towards the Problem of Prospects for Interdisciplinary Research

Introduction. The variety of approaches and topics in the study of terrorism, as well as the obvious difference in axiological grounds for assessing terrorist activity, allows the authors to raise the question of an interdisciplinary study of this problem. The authors understand terrorism as an illegal political confrontation in the struggle for power with the use of violence in order to intimidate or physically eliminate the enemy.Methodology and sources. The methodological basis of the work is the world-system concept of I. Wallerstein. The authors reveal the advantages of the world-system approach by comparing it with the paradigm of political realism in the theory of international relations. They indicate the boundaries of the paradigm of political realism, which operates at the level of the concepts of “States” and “International Coalitions”, while the phenomenon of terrorism includes structures at the level of groups and organizations. The world-systems approach allows researchers to see terrorism as an anti-system movement generated by the contradictions in the development of the system itself, to distinguish between pro-system and anti-system terrorism, to analyze this phenomenon at all societal levels. One of the essential advantages of the world-systems approach is its ability to accumulate different approaches and related disciplines in order to describe the dynamics of modern societies. In their theoretical constructions, the authors rely on the typology of terrorist organizations by O. Lizardo and A. Bergesen, as well as on the concept of waves of terrorism by D. Rapport. The authors conduct a critical analysis of the typology of terrorism by O. Lizardo, A. Bergesen and note that this typology helps to see the structural source (core, semi-periphery, periphery) and the main structural goal of terrorist organizations, but leaves behind such a phenomenon as state terrorism.Results and discussion. The authors describe terrorism in its interrelation with processes in the world system at different societal levels. At the super-macro level, the world-systems conditions for the emergence of waves of terrorist activity are described, and the links between terrorism and the struggle to establish a global order are indicated. At the macro level (the level of political confrontation for the establishment of some form of order within the state), the authors investigate the differences between terrorism in “closed” and “open” societies. They note the connection between bursts of terrorist activity and the transition from a “closed” to an “open” state and vice versa. The authors consider the connection of terrorism with the processes of the peripheralization of societies as a meso-level phenomenon. Such terrorism, as a rule, is local and is inspired by the national liberation slogans of the societies of the internal periphery, the authors note that the struggle with the state here can go for both sovereignty and disputed territories. The authors refer to the meso-level the activities of terrorist organizations aimed at migrants who come from the outer periphery. The authors note that the subject of terrorism research at the micro level is, as a rule, the personality of the terrorist.Conclusion. The use of a world-systems approach to consider terrorism seems promising, and allows researchers to consider structural relations that are not available to other approaches. The authors express the hope that the interdisciplinary capabilities of the world-systems approach, its methodological potential woul be able to form a reliable basis for subsequent studies of terrorism as one of the means of illegitimate political violence in the modern world.

Sore Losers: Does Terrorism and Approval of Terrorism Increase in Democracies When Election Losers Refuse to Accept Election Results?

A necessary component of peaceful democratic rule is the willingness of election losers to accept election defeats. When politicians and parties acknowledge defeat in democratic elections, they reinforce the peaceful transition of power that sustains political order. When election losers in democracies reject election results, the public’s confidence in democratic institutions is weakened, grievances and polarization abound, and the potential for violent mobilization grows. In this environment, terrorist activity is more likely. I test this proposition using cross-national time series panel data and within-country public opinion data for a wide set of democracies. I find that democracies experience significantly more domestic terrorist casualties when election losers reject election results. Moreover, I find that public willingness to tolerate and justify terrorism as a tactic increases in democratic countries where election losers reject election results.

An Explorative Study into the Importance of Defining and Classifying Cyber Terrorism in the United Kingdom

Terrorism, crime, and war are all familiar notions; however, the way in which these have been altered through cyberspace is not yet fully, nor unanimously, understood through definitions, theories, and approaches. Although the threat level of terrorism in the UK has lowered to moderate, the threat posed by cyber terrorism has nonetheless heightened throughout the COVID pandemic due to the greater necessity and presence of technology in our lives. This research aimed to highlight the necessity for a unanimous cyber terrorism definition and framework and further aimed to determine what perceptions are held by the general public regarding cyber terrorism through a mixed methods approach. The literature review confirms that there is an absence of a unanimously agreed upon definition of cyber terrorism, and furthermore that the existing academic definitions are not compatible with UK legislation. In addition, the literature review highlights an absence of a cyber terrorism framework that classifies what kind of terrorist activity is cyber enabled or cyber dependent. Quantitative data from the online survey find a couple of significant effects implying the necessity for greater diversity amongst stakeholders which could potentially enhance the detection and prevention of terrorism in the UK. The qualitative data find that although there is some agreement amongst the sample population in views held towards cyber terrorism, some misconceptions are nonetheless present which could have implications on the general public’s ability to identify and report cyber terrorist activity. Overall, the findings from the literature review and the primary data collection aid in developing a cyber terrorism definition that is compatible with UK legislative definitions, and further aids in developing a terrorist activity framework that succinctly highlights the inextricable links between traditional, cyber enabled, and cyber-dependent terrorism.

Legal Rigidity and Digital Fluidity: Relationships between the State and the Internet

This paper shall focus on the transformative nature of technology, namely in facilitating criminal and terrorist activity and the unique challenges to regulation. The Internet requires a re-examination of static concepts of territorial boundaries and legal jurisdictions which contribute to uncertainty in regulation.

Ostmark

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

#ShamimaBegum: An analysis of social media narratives relating to female terrorist actors

This study explores the constructions of gender in social media narratives regarding Shamima Begum, a British born woman who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Using the Twitter hashtag #ShamimaBegum – developed in response to Begum’s expressed interest in returning to the United Kingdom to give birth to her third child – we employ critical discourse analysis to examine social media users’ responses to Begum’s case across a 3-week period. We portray how the vernacular narratives constructing femininity, gender, and their relation to terrorist activity are built on the expectation that the female actor should express remorse for her actions and is judged according to certain perceptions of maternalism, religion, and victimhood. We also explore the absence of considered agency in the narratives about women engaging in and disengaging from violent activities, demonstrating the weight of race, religion, and gender in shaping narratives surrounding perceived violent women.

Terrorism and emergency constitutions in the Muslim world

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if this is also true for autocratic governments. Are non-democratic governments equally subject to constitutionalized constraints regarding their reactions to emergencies and particularly to terrorist attacks? To answer the question, we analyse the behaviour of a specific group of predominantly autocratic governments that are particularly subject to frequent terrorist incidents, namely the states that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Employing data on terrorist activity from the Global Terrorism Database and constitutional data from the Index of Emergency Powers, we estimate the association between constitutionalized constraints and terrorist attacks in a dataset covering 48 member-states of the organization observed annually between 1970 and 2014. As hypothesized, we find that emergency constitutions that politically make it relatively cheap for governments to declare a state of emergency are more likely to be invoked. In addition, we find that governments are more likely to increase repression after terrorist events when the constitution allocates more discretionary power to the government in emergencies. Our evidence thus suggests that emergency constitutions also impact on the behaviour of largely autocratic governments.

Terrorism and Democracy

This article proposes a new explanation of the positive correlation between democracy and terrorism detected in many previous studies. It is shown that this might be accounted for by the fact that factional democracies are subjected to more terrorist attacks than the other political regimes. A positive relationship between the democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies in the sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime is negative. The analysis allows to maintain that factional democracy is a rather powerful factor of a high level of terrorist activity, while non-factional democracy turns out to be rather a statistically significant predictor of a relatively low intensity of terrorist attacks.

THE MODERN PROCESSES OF RADICALIZATION AND THEIR CONNECTION WITH TERRORIST ACTIVITY

In its modern manifestations, terrorism increasingly relies on synergy between different influences and approaches. This allows the impact, the effect of which significantly exceeds the mechanical sum of the effects of the individual forms and approaches. The main component and motivational tool of terrorism is the process of radicalization. Despite the lack of consensus on the understanding of the phenomenon of radicalization. This phenomenon is imposed as a consequence and result of increasingly complex social processes in modern and postmodern societies.