Yesterday, at the IFSEC International Show, two think-tank analysts came together to hash out where security is going to go over the next few years. Although neither speaker pretended to have a crystal ball, both pointed to some key current trends that are bound to continue.
Jamie Bartlett, head of the Violence and Extremism Programme at Demos, Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank, pointed to key political trends around Islamist threats in the United Kingdom.
“The threat from Islamist groups in UK is continuing to fragment. We have a distinct difference between international Al Quaeda groups,” he said in a talk on the opening day of the show. “There have been big, hard-hitting attempts on hard targets, but home-grown threats are continuing on soft targets, which can cause major disruption.”
In addition, Bartlett predicts a flattening of far right political parties. “The populist extremist parties across Europe have been growing in strength but not in the last three or four years. We will continue to see growth in openly neo-Nazi cells across Europe, and they will continue to hold flash mob demonstrations to cause disruption.”
Further, Barlett pointed to a current trend that he characterized as a “strange symbiotic relationship between the far right and far left street movements” and predicted that the two groups will continue to arrange meet-ups for the purpose of creating a demonstration/counter demonstration, both in person and online.
Benoit Gomis, research analyst on international security at Chatham House, meanwhile, offered a somewhat hopeful message. “Despite conflicts, the world is getting safer,” he reported. “There’s a decline in violence between states, and we are slowly going toward a world that is seen less through the lens of terrorism.”
However, Gomis does not counsel a stance of diminished attention. “We realize we need to get better at managing terrorism without neglecting other trends. There needs to be a rise in security, as well as understanding terrorism in a more nuanced way.”
Terrorism, by Gomis’s definition, is about radicalism and political violence. “We are keen to say we are intervening in Mali because of a terrorist threat here, but the situation is more complicated, and the aim is to achieve political stability,” he said by way of example.
The increase of drug trafficking and organized crime should be another focus on the national security stage, Gomis contends. On a global level, drug trafficking is an estimated $320 billion industry, making it a critical arena of attention. Further, cybersecurity at a government level will need to be a priority. “There has been a dramatic extension of networked users and devices,” Gomis said. “The world is getting more complex and interconnected. These cliches reflect the point that we are more aware of how multifaceted and complex the security problems we are facing are.”
Clearly, national and international security will, in some ways, remain the same. At the same time, the biggest threats of today, including extremism, terrorism, and organized crime, will only continue to be key security drivers.
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