When focusing on organisations which may constitute a serious threat to nation-states, we find that they mainly consist of organisations capable of acting globally o alternatively co-operating or gaining support from transnational networks. This co-operation yields economic viability and provides access to competence and technology. If, instead, focus is placed on conflicts involving violence or threats of violence, we find that the assault, to a large and probably increasing degree, may come from within the society itself. This is true when a criminal organisation tries to take over the legal institutions in a state, when a warlord takes control over primary commodities, when a fundamentalist religious movement tries to transform a secular state into a theocracy and when a state uses asymmetrical warfare and carries out anonymous assaults on other states.