The main purpose of the article is to analyze the cultural dimension of military-led endeavors of the international community aimed at countering asymmetric threats such as post-modern terrorism and insurgencies. Although the international community agreed that military activity itself is not a proper answer to the transnational terrorist threat, the use of military components will be continued in such activities. In particular that military operations have nowadays extended way beyond the traditional, Clausewitz’s hard power concept. Not only do we observe the shift of the centers of gravity in today’s operations towards the human terrain, namely the area of operation population. Contemporary military operations also characterize with rising significance of non-kinetic elements in "COIN," anti- and counterterrorism operations, such as civil-military cooperation, civil affairs, psychological and information operations, which base on profound knowledge of adversaries’ cultures. With the emergence of population-centric operations, an urgent need of considering cultural factors of the Area of Operation emerged, and the missing link between the awareness of the cultural aspects of threats, such as also terrorist activity, and operational plans that consider them, has not yet been found and fully utilized in military planning. Therefore we face a need of the skill of operationalization of culture, understood as the identification of vital for military activities features of culture of any object of the activity, and integrating such knowledge and skills into the processes of shaping military security. Hence, although the article’s main focus is on military aspects of combating terrorism, the strategic security environment changes and the paradigm shift, demand us to consider wide, sociocultural context, not only criminal and military aspect of terrorism. Although insurgency and terrorism are not the same phenomena, their culture, motivations, mechanisms and organizational structure is alike, and they both use terrorism as heir tactics. Many of the lessons learned during counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq can be used while combating terrorism within military and other security operations elsewhere, not only for the needs of the military, but also other armed formations - such as the police - and civilian specialists working in the field. Gathered research proves that operationalization of culture can be an effective tool of enhancing the effectiveness of employing uniformed formations to counter violent extremisms.
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Despite regulatory and legal changes, women are persistently underrepresented in military organisations on peacekeeping missions. This article argues that part of the reason for this can be found in persistent stereotypical ideas about gender roles, and looks at the attitudes and experience of Polish military personnel who have been deployed on peacekeeping missions as evidence of this. However, witnessing other militaries stance on gender, where such stereotypes are still there, but not as entrenched, can cause personnel to contextualise if not question their own organisation’s stance on gender. Sixteen Polish military peacekeepers were interviewed in-depth about their experiences on peacekeeping missions as part of a European H2020 project, Gaming for Peace (GAP). The interviews were used to build scenarios for a digital role-playing game to develop soft skills among peacekeeping personnel, and these soft skills included gender awareness. This article analyses the interviews to explore the experience of gender for both men and women in the Polish military, and shows that there is an urgent need for the type of training in gender awareness that is part of GAP.
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