Umstrittene Schweizer Sicherheitspolitik ... - ETH Zürich

Institute
tion proliferation, regional conflicts, state failure, organized crime, and
internal conflicts. Sweden’s list is almost identical, it adds cross-border
trafficking in drugs, women and weapons, and cyber-terrorism or attacks
on IT systems. In the UK, the list is terrorism, weapons of mass destruction,
transnational organized crime, and failed states. I think the same
kind of list would be broadly true for Switzerland, and should in some
way be reflected in its security policy statement.
What are the common features underlying these lists? There are three
broad transformations in the nature of threats that we can see probably
more clearly than a decade ago when the last Swiss security policy report
was released. The first of these transformations is the “transnational” and
networked nature of most emerging threats. Whether it is terrorism, cybersecurity,
large-scale organized crime, trafficking in drugs, weapons or other
illegal goods – all of these threats are, as the French government puts it in its
statement, “des menaces de multiples natures, diffuses, polymorphes et globales...
Asymétriques, sans frontière et utilisant de nouveaux modes d’action.”
I don’t think I need to provide details of specific threats, but I would point
out that most of the networks and networked threats that we see follow a
fairly straightforward logic: they look for weak spots, black holes, safe havens,
and areas where they can conduct their affairs with little scrutiny and relative
impunity. They also disperse their activities geographically, so that careful scrutiny
would only uncover one piece of the puzzle, and you would not likely
be able to have a clear view of the entire enterprise – whether it is criminal
activities or smuggling of dual-use goods – without additional information
from other sources. In other words, networked actors operate “in between”
states, making it difficult for any one state to identify clearly whether an activity
on its territory is part of a larger security threat or challenge.
The second feature of contemporary threats is that they blur and
sometimes in fact completely erase the distinction between what was
“internal” and what was “external”. Transnational threats are not “out
there”, but manifest themselves within state borders. The bombings in
September 2001, the London and Madrid bombings – the London bombings
were committed by UK citizens working on British soil – have been
domestic manifestations of transnational threats. This calls into question
the decades-old – if not centuries-old – division of labour between armed
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