استغلال الأزمات: الجماعات الإرهابية، اليمين المتطرّف، والجريمة المنظمة في ظل فيروس كورونا

Abstract

This research paper aims to shed light on an emerging and important issue, namely the security dimensions of the novel Coronavirus pandemic crisis through reading and tracking its implications on different terrorist/jihadist, far-right extremist, and organized criminal groups and organizations. It departs from the hypothesis that despite the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its health, economic, social and political devastating repercussions, it has presented a number of opportunities ready to be exploited by these groups and organizations. The study used the descriptive analytical approach, and relied on many primary sources and statements made by some of the groups under study in order to gauge their interpretations of the crisis, as well as monitoring and studying their reactions to it on the ground. The paper confirmed that climates of crises in general, and the Coronavirus crisis in particular, presented opportunities for those who occupy the extreme edges of the intellectual spectrums and legal existence, despite their differences and sometimes antagonism, to extend influence and score material and moral gains. Such terrorist, extremist and criminal groups are able to do that by exploiting and tapping into the crisis’s intensification of societal faultlines and tensions, as well as its highlighting of power vacuums left by those states that were either unable or unwilling to rise to the challenge and fill the void. This entails, in order to defuse the incentives for radicalisation in a post-COVID-19 environment.