Earlier this month, Bayt al Maqdis, a jihadi publishing house believed linked to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), released a book compiled of various letters written by the ideologue Abu Hudhayfah al Sudani.
Radicalisation and extremism, which can lead to violent extremism, represent a persisting security threat to the Western Balkans. In the past few decades, the Western Balkan countries have been broadly viewed as a breeding ground for religious radicals and violent extremism. Tackling violent extremism was traditionally a task for security sector agencies exclusively. Nowadays, the police have assumed a crucial role in facilitating a preventive multistakeholder approach at the local or regional level, particularly in at risk local settings. The paper presents preliminary findings of a study involving a sample of stakeholders (e.g., police, NGOs, local government representatives, civil society members, religious communities) responsible for dealing with the task of (de)radicalisation in different Western Balkan countries. The data were collected during formal training courses carried out under the auspices of the EU-funded project First Line on preventing radicalisation in 2017. Survey respondents evaluated the effectiveness of different institutions which have an impact on the (de)radicalisation process.
The Western Balkans faces a double challenge from online extremism. Online platforms are facilitating the
specific targeting of the region by diverse international extremist narratives. Meanwhile regional histories and geopolitics are being appropriated to justify extremist actions and narratives around the world. This dynamic was particularly clear in March 2019, when Brenton Tarrant carried out a devastating terrorist attack on Muslim places of worship in Christchurch, New Zealand.
On Nov. 30, the Islamic State (ISIS) announced that its leader, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, had been killed in battle and that his successor, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurayshi, was now in place. Hours later, the United States military’s Central Command confirmed the death of Abu al-Hassan, adding that it had occurred in Daraa, in southern Syria, in mid-October at the hands of “the Free Syrian Army” (FSA). For its part, the U.S. partner force in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), denied any role in the ISIS leader’s death — suggesting this may have been the first such leadership death not caused by U.S. action.
The world is changing. In fact, it has been undergoing seismic change that long preceded the Russian-Ukraine war, and the recent US-Chinese tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
In fact, the US debacle in Iraq and the Middle East, and the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan were only signs of the decline in US power.
Where is Danish foreign policy headed? Everything now revolves around the war in Ukraine and rearmament against Russia, which is quite openly called our enemy, and where sanctions are being extended and trade and contacts are being cut off in all areas. NATO now also talks about China in its new strategy papers. But what about Africa, which has for decades received Danish development aid? What does the government say about Africa, which belongs to the Global South, today a widely used term?
Russia is now in a far worse negotiating position than in 2014. Finding itself at the mercy of a monopsonist buyer, there is very little it can actually do.
A key topic of discussion during the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Moscow was the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline project planned to export Russian natural gas from the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia to China. In the wake of the war in Ukraine and ensuing collapse of trade with Europe that has left Russia’s gas reserves stranded, the pipeline has taken on new importance and urgency. While the terms of the contract remain under negotiation and shrouded in secrecy, the future outlines of its pricing formula can be discerned from the existing Russian-Chinese gas contract: for the original Power of Siberia pipeline.
Without the assistance of local actors, Russian influence in the Western Balkans would disappear overnight. But the opposite is also true. As long as local politicians can capitalize on invoking Moscow’s long shadow, Russia will remain a salient part of the Balkan landscape.
Relations with Russia will have to be overhauled, since the main subject of discussion—Karabakh—will disappear. For most Armenians, the Kremlin will be seen as an unreliable ally that abandoned them in their hour of need.
The main obstacle to the creation of a planned digital database of Russians eligible for military service is not the technology required, but the struggle between various agencies for control of this powerful new tool.
Controversial new amendments to Russia’s law on military conscription promise to radically alter the relationship between the state and society. The digitization of public services was once presented as a way of minimizing interactions between Russians and their country’s ineffective and often corrupt bureaucracy. Now it is increasingly clear that the wealth of data built up by the government is being turned into a tool for controlling people’s lives.
The problem for the state is that it is easier to find the political will to create a “digital gulag” than the technological wherewithal required. It is a monumental task that will need to be completed in record time and at a time when resources are becoming more and more scarce, not least thanks to the brain drain of IT talent from Russia and the country’s loss of access to various technologies following its invasion of Ukraine. All this gives reason to question the future effectiveness of the system being developed.
Russia’s principal means of digital control over men eligible to serve in the army is not the electronic delivery of conscription notices that will now be allowed under the amendments as much as it is the purpose-built super-database listing all those eligible to be drafted or mobilized. That would cover more or less all Russian men up to the age of fifty.
The amendments outline five categories of information to be contained in the database, starting with basic details such as contact and passport information, national insurance and individual taxpayer identification numbers, and whether a person is married or has children.
That will not be hard for the government to obtain, as it is already on file and in the possession of the tax authorities, whose digitization was one of the current Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s major achievements as tax chief from 2010 to 2020. It is also available through Gosuslugi—a website and app used by millions of Russians to perform everyday tasks such as applying for a passport—which requires users to input those details in order to use it.
The second category is information on a person’s location, from any addresses where they are officially registered permanently (a requirement for all Russian nationals) or temporarily, to whether they are a national or resident of any foreign countries. Here, it’s not such plain sailing for the state. The agency in possession of most of this information is the Interior Ministry, which is averse to sharing information with other institutions. It is also rarely if ever externally audited, calling into question the quality and accuracy of its records.
The many, many Russians who do not reside where they are registered largely fly under the radar of the Interior Ministry and other security services, since the mechanism by which the authorities are informed of changes of address exists only on paper. To be sure, if need be, any individual can be tracked down with the help of banks and mobile operators. But that cannot be scaled up for millions of military-age men.
The third category of information is that provided by the permanent enlistment offices that exist in Russia, where nearly all men aged eighteen to thirty are expected to perform obligatory national service. The first wave of wartime conscription last fall revealed that none of the enlistment offices’ records had been digitized. Back then, President Vladimir Putin tasked the Federal Tax Service and the Digital Development Ministry with creating a database of Russians eligible for conscription by April 2024.
These bodies’ authorship of the database is reflected in the penalties draft dodgers will now face, from the inability to take out loans or register small businesses to being prevented from selling vehicles and property. These punishments can be doled out on the basis of details that are already available to the Federal Tax Service and which constitute the fourth category of information contained in the database.
Draft dodgers will also be banned from leaving the country, and that will be far trickier to enforce. Only the Federal Security Service (FSB)’s border force may stop people at the border, and it will need the passport numbers of conscription-eligible men to do so. That’s easier said than done. Back in the fall, border guards did stop some military-age men from fleeing abroad, ordering those unlucky few to attend their local enlistment offices, but it was obvious that there was no rhyme or reason to the system.
The digital mechanism behind those checks was the Mir information system, an extremely expensive product of an earlier drive to digitize the passport details and border crossing records of Russian citizens. But that same system was in 2020 found to be seriously lacking by the Accounts Chamber, the state auditor: it was not even always accurate in recording people’s biological sex, never mind details such as changes of surname. There is no reason to believe that this system will perform better next time it is tested.
The fifth and final category of information is grounds for exemption from conscription, ranging from university studies to disability and other health conditions. Disability records will be relatively straightforward to integrate using Pension Fund data on welfare payments, but health and education details will not. Collecting, standardizing, and processing education data in coordination with thousands of educational institutions will be impossible in such a short period of time. Accomplishing the same with health records will face the added challenge of laws on patient confidentiality.
The government may well push these problems onto those facing conscription, requiring them to provide enlistment offices with documents supporting their cases for exemption. Yet in the fall, some IT specialists arrived at enlistment offices with proof of their exemption only to find themselves dispatched to the front anyway.
Ultimately, the main obstacle to the database’s creation is not poor government data or the challenge of integrating public records. It is the infighting within the state, where many institutions are reluctant to allow their information systems to be absorbed into a super-database. After all, that would mean an end to the awarding of contracts for hundreds of IT systems created for a specific function for those agencies: contracts that are currently given to favored suppliers as part of a rents chain. In addition, holding their own data helps these agencies to prove to Russia’s leadership that they are essential.
The security services are particularly protective of their records, hiding behind their classification to avoid taking part in data integration efforts. They may, however, see the creation of the database as an opportunity to appropriate others’ information systems.
Institutions have already started arguing over who is responsible for the project’s execution. Yet regardless of whether the architect turns out to be the FSB, the Federal Tax Service, or the Digital Development Ministry, tight deadlines and the difficulty of the task mean there is little chance of the database delivering results.