Terrorist groups face a wide range of organizational issues. They have to recruit members, raise funds, articulate a political vision, develop operational plans, train personnel, execute attacks, and justify their actions. Unlike most organizations, however, they must do so while remaining as covert as possible, making all the normal challenges of organizational management significantly harder. This chapter reviews the organizational issues that terrorist groups face and that counterterrorist organizations should take into account.

This chapter takes the Philippines as a case to elucidate the direction and speed of electricity system transition under a vertically unbundled, competitive wholesale market model, with a focus on changes in the complementary elements of the electricity system. The study employed the analytical framework based on the grid paradigm presented in Chapter 3. The results showed that despite institutional development consistent with systems based on renewable-energy-sourced electricity (RES-E), delays in infrastructure development in high-voltage backbone and interconnection transmission grids and restrictive RES-E policy have stimulated investments in new coal power plants and deterred transitions to RES-based systems. Energy security concerns about the perceived growth of electricity demand and depletion of domestic gas fields motivated the government to use natural gas as additional generation fuel rather than balancing power. Energy oligarchs capitalised on the moratorium on new coal plants to supply ancillary services from fully depreciated coal power, investing in large-scale battery energy storage systems and gas power assets, and increasing economic gains. These factors are likely to direct the Philippines towards a natural-gas-based electricity system, combining the flexible paradigm in the RES-based system with a few clean dispatchable capacities.

This Chapter examines whether and to what extent WTO members can be accountable for applying security measures before international adjudicators and how the invocation of security exceptions can impact the international courts’ or tribunals’ proceedings. The idea of balancing free trade and national security is bound to substantiate itself in a compression of the right to sovereignty, which can be assessed through the good faith review or the use of a necessity test. The investigation of the meaning and mechanisms of these tests and the scope of discretion that should be granted to the decisions of WTO members in their national security matters allows for establishing the framework for reviewing security exceptions.

This chapter presents an analysis of changes in the elements of the electricity system in Vietnam, elucidating the direction and speed of electricity system transitions under conditions of vertical bundling and underdeveloped markets. The study employs an analytical framework based on the grid paradigm presented in Chapter 3. The results showed that disorderly and abrupt electricity sector reform and underdeveloped infrastructure have impeded transitions towards renewable-energy-sourced electricity (RES-E) systems; however, the study suggests that natural gas can bridge the change in generation between coal and RES-E. Despite feed-in tariffs for RES-E and internal and external landscape changes, such as negative implications of coal power plants, the pledge to Global Coal to Clean Power Transition Statement and net-zero emissions, international credit restrictions, and high-voltage backbone transmission grids, RES-E projects are deemed less bankable owing to uncertain, abrupt, and disorderly policy intervention. Coal and gas inertia are reinforced and a fuel shift to gas will be accelerated despite national security concerns over increasing dependency on imported natural gas. Past commissions to coal and gas power will direct the electricity system towards ammonia-biomass co-firing and hydrogen power to mitigate asset stranding once these technologies become commercially available on a large scale.

On June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb committed the most consequential terrorist attack of the twentieth century, shooting dead the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife as their motorcade rode through Sarajevo. The young assassin, a civilian armed and trained by a Serbian intelligence officer, could not have known that by killing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire he would trigger the First World War. Yet he did. Allies of both Austria-Hungary and Serbia honored existing commitments, so their bilateral conflict escalated into a war of unprecedented scale, killing 20 million before it ended in 1918. Worse, instabilities resulting from that war contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War two decades later, which was four times as lethal. To this day those catastrophes cast dark shadows on our lives.

This final chapter summarizes key arguments about how the neglect of decentralized property rights and markets as central elements of US environmental legislation can inform overall institutional formation. Although transaction cost efficiencies motivate private institutional change, they have not been major drivers in government policy. Rent-seeking dominates, with implications for institutional formation and human welfare.

In this paper, we analyze the role of global geopolitical risks (GPRs), including those associated with terror attacks and threats, on the realized volatility of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), i.e., the G7 countries, over the period 1917 to 2016. For our purpose, we use a time-varying nonparametric panel data model approach, which offers substantial efficiency gains in estimating the relationship in a time-varying manner, while controlling for nonlinearity and cross-sectional interdependencies across economies, unlike a time series-based model. We find that GPRs can decrease or increase volatility contingent on the state of the two variables of concern, with attacks having a stronger impact on volatility than threats. Our results have important implications for investors and policymakers.

Climate-related stranded assets have attracted attention owing to growing concerns over the negative impacts of decarbonisation on the value of assets of carbon-intensive industries and the economy-wide knock-on effects of massive value destruction within the fossil fuel industry. However, the propagation of climate-related transition risk to the electricity sector through both financial and non-financial networks has been under-investigated. A literature review was conducted to extract theoretical causal channels and to identify bottlenecks on the ground. In theory, the financial sector revalues the costs of capital and financial assets and employs various measures to transfer the risk. On the ground, few energy and electricity companies have stepped into the early retirement of existing capacity even though major private banks, institutional investors, and export credit agencies worldwide are changing engagement with them. Chinese state banks’ continuous financing of coal power remains a barrier to the early retirement of new capacity. Financial approaches to individual companies can change these behaviours only when they are synchronised with changes in the electricity system and when accessibility to critical minerals, metals, and technologies for flexible and dispatchable generation capacity is ensured. The research incorporates empirical evidence to update the analytical framework used.