The Czech Republic is a country that currently enjoys a
relatively high security standard. The situation is also due to
long-term efforts in conceiving and executing appropriate
security policy of the country. The Czech Republic was
established in 1993 on the background of dramatic and
fundamental transformation of the global security environment,
its consequences along with the factors ensuing from further
development also affecting the level of security of the modern
Czech country and its citizens.
The necessary precondition for successful and effective
security policy of the country is the ability to quickly and
accurately assess the actual or potential security threats and
risks. The results of such analysis constitute key background
for choosing the strategies of maintaining or increasing the
security of the reference object and present basis for balanced
decisions, conceptions and stating priorities on the field of
security policy.
The dynamic development of security environment has involved
the need for re-evaluating the traditional approach to security
studies or studies and assessment of security threats and
risks. In this respect, the COPRI (Copenhagen Peace Research
Institute) approach that enlarges the subject of security
studies and introduces new elements and procedures becomes more
widespread in the course of the 90s and is now present also in
the Czech professional environment.
In the Czech academic environment, security studies (and
analysis of security threats and risks as their part) are a new
and dynamically developing socio-scientific discipline that has
also faced a number of problems. Especially in the 90s, there
was a negative impact of absent or weak tradition of
independent objective treatment of security in our country,
lack of interest in its results on the part of the political
decision-making bodies, insufficient support of educational and
research institutes, appearing generation gap within the small
security community, preference of practice to academic
research, etc. The field of socio-scientific interest also
suffered from lacking or insufficient implementation of
appropriate framework for research activities, competition and
lack of coordination in the approach to studies of security,
confusion in terminology, etc.
The presented work is a contribution to discussion and an
attempt to outline some of the issues related to the process of
analyzing and predicting security threats and risks in the
Czech Republic. The author tried to apply selected elements of
the so-called conceptual apparatus of security analysis of the
Copenhagen group to the actual Czech situation in the area of
analysis and prediction of security threats and risks.
Besides outlining the basic conceptual starting points, the
author s attention focuses on introducing the mechanisms and
methods of evaluating threats and risks common in the Czech
environment, their description and classification, ambiguous
conception of the basic terminology, the position of analysis
and prediction of security threats in the process of conceiving
the security policy of the country and its reflection in the
strategic documents of the Czech Republic, the problem of
securitization and the securitization movement in the Czech
society, description of selected actors involved in the process
of securitization, the status of research in the area of
security studies in the Czech Republic, etc.