Super-traditional security

After World War II in mid-1940s, security studies evolved to be an independent scientific field. Its role has escalated with the emergence of Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, affecting the global security and creating political blocs in the east and west.

This unstable environment led security experts and researchers to use traditional security as a term, concerned with armament (traditional and nuclear) and all types of war. As the collapse of the Soviet Union loomed in the mid-1980s, new security schools – such as Copenhagen and Aberystwyth/Paris -- materialized intellectual approaches and concepts of this field of study.

 New threats, categorized under nontraditional security, emerged such as human and water security, the organized crime, etc.  The nontraditional security concept has expanded over the past 30 years to include new treat such as cybercrimes, climate, epidemics, terrorist groups, armed militias, human trafficking and illegal migration.

Consequently, the national security concept has expanded significantly to include political, social, military, economic and cultural and other elements. The traditional security concept has exceeded the military perspective to include threats emanating from the political, social and economic aspects.

As the sources of threats have become more and more complicated over the past four years with traditional and nontraditional threats got intertwined with external and domestic ones, the security threat posed a danger to the whole pillars of the state: land, people and regime.

Consequently, some researchers are now talking about new concept: super-traditional security, which emerged in 2017 in some European countries.

The new concept delves into the general policies of future threats resulting from traditional and nontraditional threats in a bid to achieve a number of objectives:

1-      Exploitation of weaknesses in the history of an enemy, studying the historical political, social and economic transitions. It studies the legal and legislative system, the home policies and internal conflicts in a country. It also studies a country's foreign relations with other countries.

2-      The study of the enemy's geostrategic environment in terms of the geographic location, and how this location affects its relations with neighboring and regional countries. It also pinpoints areas of geographic, ethnic and religious conflicts.

3-      The study and tackling of polarization and rift in the enemy's environment.

4-      The study of technological weakness of the enemy in terms of infrastructure, manufacturing, scientific research and communications.

5-      The study and analysis of ideological conflicts in the enemy's environment.

Super-traditional security researchers have named a number of threats to be tackled by the hybrid security as follows:

1-      The study of methodology and instruments that impact information whether revealed to the public or not in terms of gathering sources, observation and analysis.

2-      The observation and analysis of the reasons for logistic weaknesses at sensitive sector in the state, i.e. energy or strategic commodities.

3-      The study of reasons for financial and commercial blackmail of a country by individuals, corporations or countries.

4-      The study of new terrorist organizations and the ideologies and instruments that may develop and sustain these groups.  

The researchers defined three central operational mechanisms for the super-traditional security as follows:

1-      Action forecast and defining the sources and elements of hybrid threats.

2-      Defining the fixed and variable factors of the hybrid threat and the separation of the active element in a bid to study its characteristics and analyzing possible impacts.

3-      Outlining possible reactions in the wake of possible threats. In other words, the development of integrated reactions to confront these hybrid threats via upgrading the analytical capabilities of the information and intelligence agencies, in addition to enhancing the evaluation process of defects in the present security system. The objective is to achieve the highest possible efficiency and flexibility and the reduction of human errors in information analysis and the laying out of confrontation mechanisms.

Conclusion

Security studies have become one of key research fields due to widespread traditional and non-traditional security threats in the region and across the world. Therefore, the pace of security analysis and research has escalated ushering in new concepts like super-traditional or hybrid security which has enabled researchers study new security threats and define their characteristics, measuring the weight of each threat to help decision-makers confront serious dangers that directly pose a threat to the state.