Pandemic Entanglement: COVID-19 and Hybrid Threats in the Republic of Cyprus

Abstract

How have modern threats and challenges manifesting during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the Republic of Cyprus at state and societal levels? What are the links between new security challenges and existing conventional conflicts? COVID-19 has spread anxiety, fear, and misleading information, and it has brought forth new challenges and concepts in how we understand security. This paper examines how these challenges are rooted in a security struggle of hybrid-threat entanglement in the Republic of Cyprus during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically in the first two waves from March to October 2020. Specifically, the paper views COVID-19 itself as a hybrid threat that has bred a range of security issues of the Republic of Cyprus. Hybrid threats are of a multitudinous nature. When hybrid threats like a pandemic virus disrupts the wider security and routinised processes in everyday life, states and societies become trapped in a process of security entanglement: one type of threat becomes interlinked with other processes. When this process of security entanglement is neglected or overlooked (thereby avoiding disentangling), policy at large is affected, be it a State’s foreign,
economic, or security policy. As a result, society itself is affected.