Project: Deriving an Effective Early Warning Mechanism Addressing Hybrid Threats

Overall objective:

The overall objective of this project is to derive the logical mechanism explaining  the operation of “hybrid war”, as a conflict technology, which will clarify and make sense of the impact of various “hybrid” tools, which will open opportunities to identify and map the weak elements of the “hybrid war”, permitting for conceptually-targeted and therefore effective policy interventions from civil society, think-tanks, mass-media, scientific community and public authorities. It is basically a general strategy, a recipe how to understand specific variations of “hybrid war” and address them.

Specific objectives:

• To derive an Early Warning mechanism that would facilitate the identification of “hybrid” types of foreign aggression;
• To enhance the capacity of civil society, mass-media and scientific community via exploring and piloting the proposed Early Warning mechanism, including in cooperation with the relevant public authorities.

Key activities:

A team of experts from IPRE and Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) will work together to implement the following activities:

• Develop of an adapted and refined policy review clarifying the conflict technology behind the “hybrid war” approach, that will allow for a more efficient use of resources and the creation of more effective policies addressing “hybrid war” risks through a pilot Early Warning Mechanism.
• Prepare a methodology deriving a holistic approach to an Early Warning Mechanism, based on threat indicators for monitoring and assessment.
• Prepare a report mapping the hybrid threats in Moldova piloting the EWM methodology.
• To validate, advocate and pilot the Early Warning Mechanism aimed at capacity-building among different stakeholders to enable the monitoring and assessing of active hybrid threats. 

Project beneficiaries:

• Moldovan CSOs, think-tanks and academic community.
• Moldovan policymakers in particular from: Ministry of Defense, MFAEI, Security and Intelligence Service, other relevant ministries, the Government and the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova.
• Moldovan media outlets.
• General public, citizens of the Republic of Moldova.

Implementation period:

The Project is financed by Dutch Embassy Office in Moldova.

The project will be implemented between July 2020 – March 2021 (9 months).