Terrorist Threats in the South of Russia: Opinion of Politicians and Experts

The article provides assessments and forecasts of the dynamics of terrorist activity in the North Caucasus on the basis of an analysis of the opinions of experts and politicians dealing with the analysis of problems of terrorist threats in the region. The following features of modern terrorism are revealed: transition from well-organized local groups, supported by sponsoring states, to freely structured international networks of terrorist groups; appeal to non-state sources of financing; the absence of a clearly defined political context for the goals of terrorists. The study revealed a mismatch of assessments of the terrorist situation in the North
Caucasus made by security officials and scholarly experts. From the point of view of the first, the situation is characterized by the persistence of a high level of threats, while according to the second, the level of terrorist threats has decreased to an average. At the same time, further de-escalation of criminal-terrorist tension in the region is not predicted either by experts or security officials. The factors of maintenance and reproduction of extremism and terrorism in the North Caucasus region are analyzed and the following hierarchy is proposed: socio-psychological, cultural-educational, information-communicative, geopolitical and socio-economic.
The proposed sequence of factors indicates the importance of maximally individualized and specifically oriented preventive work with people.