By Ayat el-Haddad
States bear huge responsibility to balance between maintaining national security and stability on the one hand and preserving human rights values jointly on the other.
For Egypt, there are many internal and external threats and challenges affecting national security.
The internal threats affect the state’s internal entity and threaten its national security; meanwhile the external ones are those that a certain country adopts to bring about a sharp and sudden change in the current international situation.
Between both threats appears the axiom of crisis management, referring to the procedures that lead to controlling and reducing the conflict in the face of attempts at provocation and escalation, exactly what Egypt is doing at present, with the escalation in Gaza.
The strength of any political system and the extent of its ability to achieve national security is also measured by its ability to meet the basic needs of the masses at home while ensuring freedoms and achieving stability against national, regional and international challenges.
National security at any level consists of several basic areas, which are the source of its strength or weakness. If these are threatened in all or some parts, national security becomes a threat, and their weakness creates ways to penetrate into national security, weather politically, economically, military, or socially as well as Informationally.
With the spread of information technology, it has become possible to launch information attacks in addition to launching attacks on land, air, and water.
There is a difference between threats, challenges, and national security risks.
Threat: is the conflict of national interests and goals reaching a stage where it is impossible to find a peaceful solution that provides the state with its minimum political, economic, social, and military security, with the state’s inability to balance between external pressures, which may force the conflicting parties, or any of them, to resort to the use of armed force.
As for the challenges, they are the difficulties facing the state that limit its rate of growth and constitute a stumbling block to its progress.
Each country is trying hard to develop policies and use appropriate methods to overcome these difficulties, which may of course differ from one country to another.
Risks are the possibilities for future hostilities that have not yet crystallised into any threat, but over time, it can turn into a threat.
The writer is Member of parliamentary foreign relations committee
