Mrs. Amina Šurković is an activist with the Initiative Against Religious and Racial Intolerance (PRVI Initiative), established in 2017 with an aim to protect the freedom of religion and belief in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans. The PRVI Initiative deals with systemic approach in tackling the violations of the freedom of religion by reporting the cases of discrimination, building capacities of local NGOs and informal groups, and working with authorities on how to prevent hate speech, violence, and prejudice against the minority religious groups. PRVI Initiative regularly contributes to the OSCE Hate Crime Report.
“I would first like to thank you for hosting this very important event, and I feel very honored to be able to provide my perspective on these challenges and listen to other invited experts from other organizations and countries. Since it is a phenomenon that affects almost all aspects of human rights, then it can be viewed from the angles of various scientific disciplines.”, said Shurkovic on a beginning of her address on the Regional Conference “Attacks on democracy and human rights”, held on 28 july, 2021 in Skopje.
Shurkovic referred to hybrid attacks from a criminological point of view, in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“I was thinking about what to focus on today, so I decided to go back to my background criminology and try to explain hybrid attacks and disinformation from our criminological point of view, along with prevention of course, in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In December as you know, in 2018, the European Union, adopted an action plan against disinformation, recognizing it as a serious threat to democratic processes, however, such activities were absent in Western Balkans, where hybrid attacks were not recognized by government actors, academia, or media professionals in the region. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the awareness of this issue is even less present than in neighboring countries. Hybrid threats are extremely difficult to monitor, to anticipate, and to respond to. The actual state of hybrid attacks is not covered by any statistics. In criminology we have this the crime triangle which identifies three factors that create a criminal offence. I will try to use the same model to explain hybrid attacks in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
So, the first factor is intention, the individual or the group must have the ability and knowledge. Here, it is very important to emphasize the difference between lies and factual errors. A person may make a factually incorrect statement believing it to be true. It is the intention to deceive that separates these two categories and it is a key element of political misinformation.”, pointed out Shurkovic.
“The second factor that criminologists are very interested in are the attackers. The people or groups who are behind the spreading of disinformation and hybrid attacks. It is impossible to create one profile that suits all of them but some common motives are entertainment, profit, political of course motives, anger, revenge, and other emotional needs. I will mention here because it can lead us to founder of academic discipline of cyber criminology K. Jaishankar who developed the space transition theory of cyber crimes which tries to explain why people behave so differently when move to cyber space.
Misinformation is poorly, or not at all, recognized as a possible hybrid threat, so there is almost no public about possible responses to such threats. So, low awareness of cyber-security and media literacy makes population more vulnerable to crime and a suitable audience for manipulation.”, pointed Shurkovic.
Camera: Dehran Muratov
Video editing: Arian Mehmeti
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