Defence and strategy

Useful Tool or Useless Effort?

Jan BŘEŇ, Tomáš ZEMAN, Aleš KUDLÁK, Rudolf URBAN

An integral part of the issue of terrorism is not only the consequences of committed terrorist acts that lead to subsequent security measures, but also the causes of terrorist activities, which determine the reasons why people are motivated to commit them. This paper focuses on the social, economic, and security policy factors that potentially generate future terrorist activities. The main goal is to analyse the opinions of 52 respondents from 31 countries, i.e., experts from military, police, and academic institutions. The method of analytical hierarchy was chosen for the respondents, who decided on the importance of individual factors. According to the respondents, the most important factor of the current national and violent international war is the security-political area. It is followed by social inequality (in the social area) and unemployment (in the economic area). The achieved results show a certain reflection of the evaluated factors regarding the competitiveness of individual countries, which can significantly affect not only the level of threat of terrorist activities in the country, but also their potential mobility.