Abstract
‘Hybridity’ is in vogue these days. Yet, the utility of the hybrid label is often contested in security studies. A problem relates to how the concept of hybrid warfare has been extended to cases that have little in common with the cases from which the concept was originally derived. This article suggests making a conceptual distinction between hybrid warfare and hybrid interference. The article is devoted to developing this latter, new strategic concept. In essence, hybrid interference is conceptualized as a ‘wedge strategy’, namely a policy of dividing a target country or coalition, thereby weakening its counterbalancing potential. By drawing particularly on recent practices by China and Russia, the article shows how hybrid interference uses a panoply of state-controlled, non-kinetic means, which are more or less concealed in order to provide the divider with plausible deniability and to control targeted actors without elevating their threat perceptions. Three main bundles of means are central to hybrid interference: 1) clandestine diplomacy; 2) geoeconomics; and 3) disinformation. The article shows how western democracies are vulnerable to hybrid interference. Hybrid interference makes use of the liberal values that characterize western democracy, exploiting them as opportunities to drive wedges through democratic societies and undermine governability. The article argues that this sort of external interference has been overlooked in the debate on democratic deconsolidation, that it is becoming more common, and discusses some counter-measures to defend against it.
Hybrid threats have risen to the top of the western security agenda. In 2014, ‘hybrid warfare’ became the defining label for Russia's operations in Ukraine, and it has been extended to describe what is regarded as the renewed Russian threat to European security, Chinese tactics to win battles without open conflict in the South China Sea, and the challenge to western civilization posed by non-state actors such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).1 NATO has adopted ‘hybrid threats’ terminology and has made countering threats related to hybrid warfare a central task in its strategic planning.2 In April 2016, the EU issued a joint framework on countering hybrid threats, and has since conducted a hybrid risk review, as well as launching an EU Hybrid Fusion Cell.3 A joint EU–NATO declaration in July 2016 made the building of member states’ resilience and ability to counter hybrid threats a priority.4 The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) was inaugurated in September 2017 with high-level support from both the EU and NATO.5
Yet many scholars and analysts contest the utility of the ‘hybrid’ label, criticizing it for conveying little that is new, or for being imprecise or outright misleading. When coupled with the term ‘warfare’, critics warn, there is the danger of unnecessarily militarizing the language of international politics, with potentially dangerous consequences.6 Indeed, the way we label developments in international security is not merely an academic issue, but will affect how policy-makers understand and deal with security challenges, with potentially far-reaching repercussions for interstate relations.
A particular problem relates to how the concept of hybrid warfare is extended to cases that are very different from those from which the concept was originally derived.7 Russia's meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and Hezbollah's tactics against Israel are hardly equivalent modes of conflict. Yet both have been labelled hybrid warfare.8 Activities in the ‘grey zone’ between war and peace may vary significantly and should be conceptually distinguished to help analysts and policy-makers grasp this variation. Practices that rely exclusively on non-military means need to be differentiated from those that involve military means, as they may require different counter-measures.
This article suggests making a conceptual distinction between hybrid warfare and a new concept of hybrid interference. For the most part, the article is devoted to developing this latter concept. I argue that it will help us to understand the hybrid threat domain and to address some of the concerns brought up in the debate on hybridity. In essence, I conceptualize hybrid interference as a ‘wedge strategy’, namely a policy of dividing a target country or coalition, thereby weakening its counterbalancing potential. I also show how hybrid interference draws on a panoply of state-controlled, non-kinetic means that are concealed in order to provide the divider with official deniability and manipulate targeted actors without elevating their threat perceptions.9 Three main bundles of means, in particular, are central to hybrid interference: (1) clandestine diplomacy; (2) geoeconomics; and (3) disinformation.
Hybrid interference poses a particular danger to liberal democracies. It sees liberal democratic values as vulnerabilities that can be exploited to drive wedges through democratic societies and undermine governability. As such, hybrid interference can also be used as a priming phase as part of planning to escalate conflict activities. Having successfully driven in wedges by non-kinetic means, weakening the target country or coalition, the stage has been set to facilitate escalating activities towards hybrid warfare, or even conventional warfare. How to strengthen resilience against hybrid interference, without sacrificing these basic liberal democratic values, has become a question of major importance for the future of western democracy.
This article starts by reviewing the debate on hybridity. While concurring with some of the criticism levelled against the use of the term hybrid warfare, especially the latter element, it also shows the important merits attached to the former element. On the basis of this counter-criticism, the article turns to the new concept of hybrid interference. The penultimate section discusses how hybrid interference targets liberal democracy, and makes brief suggestions on how to strengthen resilience against it. The concluding section argues that we should expect this sort of external interference to become more common, and that it has been overlooked in the debate on democratic deconsolidation.
‘Hybridity’ and its critics
While the exact definition of the term ‘hybrid warfare’ varies somewhat among analysts, practitioners and scholars, it is usually held to mean the explicit mixing of military and non-military tactics to achieve strategic objectives. A feature of hybrid warfare is taken to be the conscious blurring of the line between war and peace, providing the aggressor with ‘plausible deniability’, and thereby reducing the risk of military blowback while also minimizing the costs associated with launching a full-scale military attack.10 Similar concepts include ‘non-linear warfare’, ‘gray zone conflict’, ‘ambiguous warfare’ and ‘full-spectrum warfare’.11 Like hybrid warfare, these concepts emphasize how war is also waged in non-kinetic spheres of combat, through a combination of both conventional and unconventional means. The focus is usually on the way unconventional tactics and tools, the use of proxy fighters and sabotage, as well as economic, political, cyber and information means, are combined to achieve strategic objectives without the extensive use of military power and physical violence. NATO defines hybrid warfare as ‘a wide range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures … employed in a highly integrated design’.12
As a concept, hybrid warfare has drawn criticism from scholars and security analysts. First, it is argued that while the use of the concept purports to illuminate a new form of warfare, this perception of novelty is misplaced, for it conveys nothing unique.13 According to war historians, the integrated use of kinetic and non-kinetic measures has been part of imperial power conduct throughout history and has featured in wars since antiquity.14
Second, while the current use of hybrid terminology has been linked to Russian strategic doctrine, critics point out that it does not adequately reflect Russian strategic thinking.15 Russian strategists use the concept of hybrid war (or ‘new generation war’) to describe alleged western efforts to destabilize adversaries such as Russia itself.16 Doctrinal references to asymmetric tactics and non-military means of pursuing strategic goals do not imply that Russia has a preconceived hybrid war doctrine or that such means represent the totality of Russian strategic planning. In Ukraine, Russia employed a strategy tailored to the circumstances with a limited objective.17 In Renz's view, ‘a very favourable context for achieving the operation's objectives meant that the use of conspicuous military force was simply not required’.18 As for any potential conflict with NATO, limiting it to the hybrid realm would not make strategic sense from a Russian perspective, as doing so would allow NATO ample time to deploy high-end US capabilities.19 Exaggerating the centrality of hybrid warfare in Russian strategy may thus obscure the true nature of Russian military policy. These critics also assert that elevating hybrid warfare to the level of strategic doctrine is misleading, as the concept does not include any aims, only tactics. Hence, if anything, this argument maintains, hybrid warfare is merely an operational approach to conducting ‘indirect war’ or ‘limited war’ under special circumstances, not a strategy or foreign policy doctrine that can tell us much about the broader intentions and goals underpinning the approach.20
Finally, the concept of hybridity is criticized for being too broad to be analytically useful. Van Puyvelde notes that, in ‘practice, any threat can be hybrid as long as it is not limited to a single form and dimension of warfare. When any threat or use of force is defined as hybrid, the term loses its value and causes confusion instead of clarifying the “reality” of modern warfare.’21 Critics also warn that branding non-military tactics, however hard-nosed, as ‘war’ may spur a potentially dangerous process of securitization.22 Foreign policy tools such as the use of disinformation, economic coercion, or election meddling for political influence do pose security challenges, but whether they should be called acts of war is questionable. Doing so not only blurs the distinction between foreign policy and war, but also lowers thresholds of threat perception, even the threshold of war itself, and may thus unleash unnecessary escalation.
Recent attempts to create a separate category for hybrid activities that fall short of warfare have not been entirely helpful. For instance, Matti Saarelainen, the director of Hybrid CoE, makes a distinction between hybrid threats and hybrid warfare.23 Within this framework, the analytical category of hybrid threats is reserved for operations that exclude the use of military means. Yet whether hybrid threats and hybrid warfare should be treated as distinct categories at the same level of conceptual abstraction seems questionable. Hybrid warfare is better viewed as a hybrid threat in itself, namely a subcategory in the hybrid threat domain. Other analysts include the use of various kinetic means in their analysis of hybrid threats but, by failing to distinguish military from non-military threat categories, end up treating cases such as Russia's interventions in Crimea and Ukraine, as well as its meddling in the 2016 US elections, as all belonging to the same category of hybrid threats.24
In the light of these criticisms, various scholars have suggested abandoning the whole concept of hybrid warfare.25 Wars, in general, are waged through a combination of conventional and unconventional means; therefore, according to these critics, analytical precision requires the breaking up of hybrid warfare into more ‘precise’ concepts such as ‘covert warfare’, ‘information warfare’, ‘economic warfare’ and ‘cyber warfare’—or simply distinguishing between familiar foreign policy means such as coercion, bribery, lying, proxy war, psychological manipulation, propaganda and others that have been part and parcel of statecraft throughout history.26 Yet it is precisely because these terms capture only various narrower dimensions of hybrid warfare that they lack the ability to convey a more coordinated effort to use these various means to achieve strategic objectives. The utility of overarching concepts such as ‘hybrid warfare’ or ‘full-spectrum warfare’ is that they hold up a mirror to a possibly more coordinated, strategic level of policy and practice.
Viewed from this perspective, the term ‘hybrid’ has the advantages of conveying the possibility of an integrated use of a variety of tactics and tools to achieve strategic objectives. For many observers, it was not any tactical novelty or specific instrument that made Russia's Ukraine operation impressive, but its effective coordination of different tactics of varying intensity tailored to exploit Ukraine's vulnerabilities.27 While the concept of full-spectrum warfare captures the idea of a portfolio of tools used to achieve synergistic effects in pursuit of some overarching strategic goal, in comparison with hybrid warfare it conveys less flexibility, and thus overlooks the possibility that the conflict need not be played out across the full spectrum. The term ‘hybrid’ better captures the potential variation in both the intensity and the precise combination of the tactics and instruments applied, with the result that—depending on the context—some means may not be applied at all and the whole operation may be carried out with low intensity. The idea may not be to conduct ‘total war’, as in full-spectrum warfare,28 but to move seamlessly and flexibly between different tactics and instruments, trying to offset the strengths of adversaries and to focus the terms of the conflict on their specific weaknesses.
Moreover, while many hybrid warfare tactics may not be novel, the circumstances in which they are used have changed, making them both more efficient and easier to apply. Modern media facilitate the use of information operations in an entirely new way.29 The use of cyber operations is also an addition to the toolbox, providing new tactical options with high detection and attribution thresholds.30 The world today is more interconnected than at any time in history. These interconnectivities enable the more extensive use of economic levers and other disruptive practices to influence target countries.31 Importantly, the politico-economic context has also changed. As will be elaborated below, hybrid tactics are often deliberately tailored to exploit ‘vulnerabilities’ inherent in liberal democracy. Much criticism of the hybrid terminology seems to overlook the ways in which these new technologies and interconnectivities enable the more aggressive application of non-military instruments in particular. It is not so much that the tactics have changed; rather that the world in which they are being applied has changed.
The fact that Russian analysts do not use hybrid terminology to describe Russia's strategic conduct, or that its strategic conduct may be broader than the hybrid warfare label denotes, does not mean it could not be of analytical use for describing aspects of Russian strategic practice. While Russia attributes hybrid warfare to the West, as Thornton observes, the Kremlin has subsequently ‘embarked on an attempt to “reverse-engineer” a Russian version of the hybrid-warfare measures’.32 Russian strategic doctrine now reflects the integrated use of military and non-military means.33 The Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, clearly sees it as imperative to coordinate kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities and operations, emphasizing how the role of the non-kinetic has grown to the extent that in many cases it has become more important than the kinetic for achieving strategic goals.34 In any case, hybrid terminology may be of analytical use in studying other state actors as well, such as China and Iran.
The most problematic element of the hybrid warfare concept is the latter part—warfare. By lowering the threshold for what are considered acts of war, the concept may help spur unnecessary conflict escalation.35 Perhaps because of such concerns, the term ‘hybrid influencing’ has become more prominent in the debate. However, it remains unclear how hybrid influencing differs from the age-old concept of realpolitik or more recent ones such as ‘smart power’.36 A recent report simply states that ‘to qualify for hybrid influencing, there need to be two or more activities taking place in an orchestrated manner in support of advancing the hybrid actors’ agenda and attaining their goals’.37 By casting the net so broadly and not defining any threshold between realpolitik and hybrid influencing, such a definition of the concept runs the risk of rendering it an ‘empty signifier’ for normal practices of statecraft. According to realist approaches to the study of international relations, the use of disinformation, punitive economic measures and political manipulation is simply part of the perennial strategic competition between states for relative power.38 Then again, if hybrid influencing is understood as also involving kinetic means, the problem becomes how to differentiate it from the concept of hybrid warfare. In either case, what novel analytical utility the term ‘hybrid influencing’ brings to the debate remains unclear.
Some scholars hold that the key component of hybrid influencing is the implicit or explicit threat of military force, compounding the effect of other hybrid influencing tools.39 This view sees military and non-military means as mutually reinforcing. It overlooks, however, the alarm likely to be caused in the target country by military posturing, heightening its threat perception and therefore possibly undermining efforts to influence it more subtly by non-military means.40 In such a context, any activities designed to influence the target country covertly, for example through economic inducements or propaganda campaigns, will probably be subjected to much more scrutiny, making these covert activities more difficult to carry out and less effective. Upholding the implicit or explicit threat of military force as a key component of hybrid influencing does not, therefore, seem entirely congruent with purposeful strategic behaviour under all circumstances.
As noted above, differentiating hybrid threats from hybrid warfare, as separate subcategories at the same level of abstraction, does not seem logical either. Hybrid warfare is usually viewed as a hybrid threat, and it would seem odd not to regard it as such.41 Here, I suggest viewing the hybrid threat domain as including both hybrid warfare and hybrid interference—the latter being a strategy that excludes military means, but that may entail a priming phase of an incremental escalation strategy. Above all, it is a strategic practice that appears particularly useful for targeting liberal democratic systems.
Hybrid interference as a strategic practice
Taking into account the considerations and the criticism of hybrid terminology set out above, this article presents the concept of hybrid interference. I define hybrid interference as the synchronized use of multiple non-military means of interference tailored to heighten divisions within target societies. Thus, rather than being a set of supposedly novel tactics for waging war, or alternatively age-old general practices of realist statecraft, hybrid interference is a strategy for the mostly covert manipulation of other states’ strategic interests. Drawing on an enhanced toolkit of state-controlled non-kinetic capabilities and reflexive control techniques, the hybrid agent interferes in domestic politics by seeking to shape perceptions in order, ideally, to incline targets to voluntarily take steps that further the agent's agenda, or, failing that, to paralyse its decision-making capacity.42 Hybrid interference, therefore, does not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, but exploits specific vulnerabilities to weaken target country unity and capacity to act in a concerted way. The underlying idea behind the strategy is that covert interference can expose and exacerbate divisions in the way targets’ strategic interests and priorities are formed, and precipitate dissent from the common line.
In particular, I conceptualize hybrid interference as a wedge strategy, namely a policy of dividing a target country or coalition, weakening its counterbalancing potential.43 The idea is not to confront the target overtly, but to weaken its resolve by covert means of interference calibrated to undermine its internal cohesion. Such covert means of interference can involve deniable cyber operations, disseminating false information, financing anti-government groups, infiltrating agents of influence, corrupting political actors, and offering economic inducements to selective actors, ideally to lure them into making a—conscious or unconscious—political bargain with the hybrid agent. If applied successfully, hybrid interference will not provoke the kind of acute threat perception that follows overt military posturing. Undoubtedly, some actors (most likely domestic intelligence operators) will start to fret about the hybrid operation. But threat perceptions will be dispersed and mitigated, as the covert activities go undetected by large parts of the population, while others, who stand to benefit from the political or economic inducements, will actively downplay the threat. Thus, by helping to provoke divisions or aggravate existing tensions among the target population, hybrid interference functions as a wedge strategy, undermining effective counterbalancing against the divider.
Hence, while the concept of hybrid influencing tends to focus on the operational level (that is the tools and tactics), hybrid interference deliberately starts at the strategic level.44 Here, ‘wedging’ is placed at the centre of the concept, serving as the common aim for all means and in all theatres of operation. When the strategy is successful, it will have a corruptive impact on the target's cohesion, aggravating divisions and conflicts within it, and thereby reducing the inclination for counterbalancing against the hybrid threat agent. As such, hybrid interference is a flexible approach and does not purport to embrace any tool of universal application. On the contrary, the tools and tactics will vary; but they will always be tailored to manipulating existing cleavages and sowing internal dissension in targets.
As a strategic practice, hybrid interference thus draws on a panoply of state-controlled non-kinetic capabilities and techniques with the aim of manipulating targets by dividing them. These instruments are more or less concealed in order to provide the hybrid threat agent with official deniability and enable it to manipulate targets without raising their threat perceptions. Three bundles of instruments, in particular, are central to hybrid interference: (1) clandestine diplomacy, (2) geoeconomics and (3) disinformation.45
Clandestine diplomacy
This is a form of covert action that involves cultivating a network of subversive organizations, movements and individuals to exacerbate existing tensions within the target country. Supporting radical or secessionist political parties, cultivating fifth columns and other agents of influence, and encouraging protest movements are means used to undermine support for central government and to promote political polarization. The idea is to exploit existing political pressure points—such as religious or ethnic divisions, anti-government and anti-establishment sentiments, or topical political sensitivities—in order to promote divisions and challenge the credibility of the government. The US-backed ‘Contra’ campaign against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s provides a well-known example of clandestine diplomacy.46 More recently, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we can point to the refugee influx in Europe and the way it appeared to open up rifts between ‘liberals’ and ‘anti-liberals’, giving neighbouring external powers the opportunity to use refugees as a disruptive force on the continent by pushing more migrants over the borders and fomenting existing cleavages.47
One advantage of clandestine diplomacy is its deniability.48 Clandestine diplomacy often involves the use of secret intelligence services that are experienced in using covert means to influence targets and establish clandestine contacts with various groups. While all intelligence agencies gather secret intelligence, many are also tasked with covert intervention functions. Sometimes, these functions are carried out by non-intelligence organizations. At its most extreme, clandestine diplomacy may include the use of targeted violence to inject fear and exploit emotional pressure points in the target society. Criminal groups can be used as proxies to carry out these tasks, providing extra capacity and a measure of deniability. There is growing evidence of collaboration between organized criminals in Europe and Russia's intelligence services.49 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also has a history of using criminals for political purposes in Taiwan. For example, in 2014 and 2017, pro-democracy protesters were attacked by thugs with links to the CCP.50 Hiring thugs and street gangs to infiltrate ethnic and political groups or staging acts of aggression between them can be a way of provoking societal polarization. This blurring of lines between intelligence services and criminal groups also increasingly takes place in cyberspace.51 The use of cyber activists and criminal hacker groups to carry out various operations adds a new layer of obfuscation.
Geoeconomics
This involves the use of economic means to interfere strategically in target countries.52 While economic coercion, such as the use of sanctions, is a classic example of geoeconomics, hybrid interference focuses on more subtle forms of geoeconomics designed not to confront the target openly, but to weaken its resolve by dividing it.53 To this end, the divider applies the operational logic of ‘selective accommodation’ by offering economic ‘sticks and carrots’ selectively to members of a target community.54 Some are given economic inducements whereas others are dealt with more harshly, and it is by manipulating economic rewards and punishments in this way that the hybrid agent exerts divergent pressures on these actors. The idea is to cause disunity and friction among them, thereby weakening their counterbalancing potential. The hybrid agent seeks to bind ‘soft targets’ to itself, lure them into making a political bargain, or uphold them inside the country or adversary coalition as interlocutors or even fifth columns.
For instance, Russia has used its energy resources to drive political wedges into target countries in Europe as well as between them at the EU level.55 As described by Weitz, ‘Russia uses subsidized energy deliveries, privileged transit and distribution networks, blackmail and threats of punishment, and corrupt practices such as bribery and illicit business alliances to gain leverage … by playing countries against each other and keeping them dependent on Russian energy flows.’56 A similar wedge strategy underpins the Kremlin's funding of radical, populist and anti-EU political parties in western Europe to strengthen the centrifugal forces within the EU.57
There are a number of economic levers that resourceful external powers can create to exert influence. Cultivating connections with business leaders and politicians by offering them business opportunities, and thereby establishing a network of local affiliates and power-brokers with an interest in undertaking advocacy on the external power's behalf and downplaying any threats connected to it, facilitates political influence. For instance, scholars and journalists have documented the way in which China has been using geoeconomics to influence Australia and New Zealand, with the ultimate aim of breaking their alliance with the United States.58 Through the deliberate policy known as qiaowu (discussed in more detail below) money has been channelled through local interlocutors to support major political parties and to cultivate loyal business networks. In this way, ‘loyalty’ is sometimes reinforced by the purposeful use of corruption and cronyism, and, as a side-product, through its tendency to provoke local public dismay and discord, increasing its wedging potential.59 On a grander scale, enticing target countries with major investment deals, such as the ones offered by China through its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, which has now been extended to Europe and Latin America, may prove effective in establishing functional control over target countries.60 These large-scale deals usually offer a range of short-term incentives for local actors, such as providing generous financing plans to cover development costs. At the same time, they create long-term liabilities with the external power, putting the host governments in a de facto hostage relationship to the external power in a pattern reminiscent of dependency relationships.61 Such relationships can be structured to create rent-seeking opportunities for businesses and corrupt officials, who will develop strong incentives to collude on these projects. Mired in controversy, these megadeals will cause friction within host countries, while distracting attention from their political intent.62
Disinformation
Disinformation is the deliberate dissemination of intentionally false or inaccurate information into the communication system of a target country or group.63 It is an umbrella term for a range of information influence operations through a variety of channels. Traditionally, disinformation has been pursued through newspapers, broadcasting, agents of influence, front organizations and forgeries to spread false rumours, half-truths and propaganda.64 These practices are now reinforced by the use of modern media technology, which provides a force multiplier for achieving broad reach and penetration. Several studies show how exploiting the hyperconnected nature of cyberspace has been critical to the recent Russian successes in planting, disseminating and lending credibility to disinformation.65 Russia's disinformation ecosystem includes news channels such as RT and Sputnik operating in western languages. They work together with online news sites, often targeted at specific audiences, that are set up to masquerade as mainstream news outlets but seed their news feeds with contentious reporting. Finally, a whole army of internet trolls (online profiles operated by humans) and bots (operated by automated processes) has been set up that flood social media and web pages with their conspiracy theories, fabrications and falsehoods.66 Similar practices are also being used by China. President Xi has led a massive campaign of information control by cornering niche foreign media through mergers, acquisitions and partnership agreements.67
Disinformation ties in with the overall strategic objective of wedging in several ways. As Sheera Frankel, a reporter for the New York Times, states: ‘When I was reporting on Russian disinformation in E. Europe one thing was consistent: they would find a schism in society & drive a wedge in.’68 At their most basic level, disinformation campaigns seek to foment public discontent and distrust. Russian disinformation campaigns have, for instance, played up rumoured (or actual) misdeeds by refugees and portrayed liberal governments as unwilling or unable to manage the influx of people seeking refuge,69 sometimes in combination with a purposeful campaign of migrant dumping to compound the effect.70 With western opinion already ambivalent on the issue, the disinformation offensive has exacerbated an already emerging polarization. In Germany, rumours of sexual violence committed by refugees against a 13-year-old girl were seized upon by the Russian media to whip up public hysteria and foment street protests, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov adding to the emotional charge by saying that the German government had to be covering something up.71 While these rumours turned out to be false, the image of a German government unable or unwilling to control the situation had already taken hold, accelerating the ebb in public support for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In the United States, both sides on the divisive issue of police brutality in Baltimore and Ferguson were further agitated by Facebook ads bought by a Russian troll farm, referred to as the Internet Research Agency.72 While not all such disinformation efforts succeed in persuading the public to believe the line promulgated, the cumulative impact in sowing distrust can be very effective. By eroding trust between the public and central institutions of democratic society, the hybrid threat agent weakens the democratic states so targeted, rendering them less capable of countering external interference.
Essential to the strategy of wedging by disinformation is the tactic of distorting the concept of ‘truth’ in political news. Flooding internet news sites and social media with ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative’ narratives of news events serves the purpose of muddying the ability of populations to separate fact from fiction, undermines dominant media sources and instils doubt in hitherto trusted sources of information.73 By making use of social media, the provision of these alternative narratives is reinforced and augmented through the echo chamber effect.74 Again, in keeping with the wedging strategy criteria, it is not necessary for everybody to be on board; only some people need to buy into the disinformation in order for political divisions to be exacerbated. Casting doubt on objective truths also paves the way for radical political movements to break away from the fringes and gain more traction for their previously marginal viewpoints.
It is important to note how tactics in each of these three bundles—clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation—can be designed and used to support and reinforce each other. The way in which China has attempted to drive a wedge into the US–Australian alliance through its qiaowu programme provides an example of such coordination of means.75 The qiaowu policy has been planned by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and implemented by the United Front Work Department of the CCP, but all government agencies are required to pursue qiaowu objectives.76 The policy involves using clandestine diplomacy to mobilize the large Chinese-Australian diaspora as a voting bloc, to intimidate critics and to protest in the streets against Australian government policy, as well as placing candidates loyal to China in parliament, local government and senior public positions. To this end, so-called United Front organizations have been set up in Australia, guided and supported by the CCP. Geo-economic means are used to reinforce such clandestine diplomacy by channelling large sums of money to these organizations, which can be used to empower targeted politicians through campaign support. Furthermore, business links are offered to certain groups to generate interest convergence. Together, these politicians and businesspeople can be used to lobby for Chinese interests and denounce critics as xenophobes and threat-mongers. In May 2016 Liu Qibao, a member of the Politburo and head of the CCP Central Committee Propaganda Department, signed a series of agreements with major Australian media outlets which, in exchange for money, were prepared to publish Chinese news stories provided by CCP-directed outlets such as Xinhua News Agency and China Daily. Acquiring a strong media presence in Australia ties in with China's broader strategy of hybrid interference, in which clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation are integrated. Geoeconomics may be used to acquire a media presence, providing channels for disinformation. Disinformation may be used to obfuscate or reinforce measures of clandestine diplomacy. Clandestine diplomacy may be used to create agents of influence that open up channels for geoeconomics. Through the combination of these means, hybrid agents will tailor their particular covert interference approach to the local circumstances in the target country.
Targeting western democracy: a theory of hybrid interference
As a strategic approach, hybrid interference is well equipped to target liberal democracies. Key features of western liberal democracy—a restrained state, pluralism, free media and an open economy—make it potentially vulnerable to hybrid interference. In this section of the article I examine these western democratic ‘vulnerabilities’ in turn, and suggest important remedies for strengthening democratic resilience against this sort of external interference.
Figure 1 illustrates the logic of hybrid interference when targeting liberal democracy. It shows how an external actor attempts to penetrate a democratic society by clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation in order to drive wedges into it. These means are designed to reinforce each other (hence the arrows in the figure) and make use of the ‘open platform’ inherent in western democracy (represented by the open box with its four democratic cornerstones).
Hybrid interference as a strategic practice: targeting liberal democracy
Hybrid interference as a strategic practice: targeting liberal democracy
Restrained state
Western democracy incorporates the liberal doctrine of a restrained state under the rule of law. According to liberal democratic theory, the state shall be restrained by constitutional mechanisms intended to defend the individual against abuses of power.77 As such, liberal democratic constitutionalism requires the state to agree to a set of ‘self-binding’ mechanisms and juridical constraints, which set limits on the powers and functions of the state.78 In a liberal democracy, therefore, the state cannot control civil society. The relationship between state and society is mediated by the rule of law, designed to uphold basic civil rights and liberties.
While such a restrained state is a necessary feature of liberal democracy, it also makes western democracies vulnerable. Functionally restrained from ‘policing’ society, the state will have limited means at its disposal to detect and protect against attempts by a hostile actor to interfere in the economy and society. The limited presence of the security state in a democratic society provides clandestine diplomacy operations with room for manoeuvre. Similarly, a hostile actor will be relatively free to use geo-economic and disinformation means of interference, which are protected by the very same liberal values that these hybrid means are designed to subvert. Committed to upholding basic civil freedoms, a western democratic state will not have at its disposal the sort of means that authoritarian states can use to monitor cyberspace and control society in general.
Pluralism
‘The very essence of democracy’, as Przeworski notes, ‘is the competition among political forces with conflicting interests.’79 Western democracy thus encompasses provisions for political and civic pluralism, enshrined by constitutionally guaranteed individual and group rights, so that these competing interests may be articulated.80 In a democratic society, individuals enter freely formed interest groups which are relatively autonomous from the state, in an ‘attempt to aggregate their interests and compete against each other in political society to influence state policies’.81 It is this multitude of competing interests that underpins democratic politics.
A certain degree of political conflict is therefore part and parcel of democratic polities. In non-democratic polities, the fact that governance is not derived from and maintained by open political competition means that pluralistic society can be suppressed. Non-democratic regimes often attempt to limit, even uproot, pre-existing sources of pluralism.82 Western democratic regimes, by contrast, attempt to institutionalize political conflict around such pluralism.
However, from the perspective of an external hostile actor, herein lies a key vulnerability of western democracy. The open pluralism of western democracy can be exploited to drive wedges into the fault-lines of existing economic, political and social cleavages, thereby sharpening conflicts between them to the point where democratic governability is undermined. Hybrid interference as a wedge strategy is deliberately designed to engender the sort of politicization and polarization that make it hard for the democracy in question to manage and process its underlying conflicts. It is because democracy is a system of institutionalized conflict that it requires a measure of social solidarity, tolerance and cohesion to function properly, balancing cleavage and conflict with bargaining and cooperation. The maintenance of a ‘civic culture’ that tempers the intensity of conflicts and bridges the cleavages of politics has been identified as a key feature of democratic governance.83 It is when the competition between competing interests in society becomes intensely polarized that this civic culture starts to fracture, and the political struggle tends to approach a zero-sum game with negative consequences for democratic governability.84 Clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation are applied to accelerate and sharpen the level of conflict by targeting the open pluralism of western democracy.
Free media
Often referred to as the lifeblood of democracy, a free media embodies a fundamental principle of liberal democratic theory and practice. By providing a pluralist platform for public debate, an unfettered and independent media constitutes a key facilitator of freedom of expression, as well as of government responsiveness and accountability to all citizens. Hence, liberal theorists have long argued that a free media is essential for the functioning of democracy.85 In reality, the media does not always live up to the ideal of the ‘fourth estate’ and its role as a civic forum for democratic deliberation. As a UN report has argued, media organizations are also used as ‘proxies in the battle between rival political groups, in the process of sowing divisiveness rather than consensus, hate speech instead of sober debate, and suspicion rather than social trust’.86 As a consequence of such use, the media will contribute to public cynicism, mistrust and polarization, and ultimately to democratic decay.
The open news and information environment of western democracy provides fertile ground for hybrid interference, particularly coordinated disinformation campaigns aimed at strengthening internal divisions and delegitimizing the existing democratic system. Upholding the liberal principle of an unfettered media makes it difficult for democratic governments to defend against disinformation campaigns. Whereas authoritarian states can suppress media sources that are displeasing to the regime, in a liberal democracy the right to alternative sources of information for all citizens is protected by law and cannot be easily censored. A resourceful hostile actor can exploit this open, deregulated media environment by employing various media outlets as vehicles for disinformation offensives. The purposeful spreading of fake news so as to distort the idea of ‘truth’ in news media is further facilitated by the democratic emphasis on balance in media reporting, which may create a false picture of the truth when having to take into account an alternative, but ultimately false, narrative. As Giles has explained with reference to Russian disinformation campaigning, ‘when presented with a consistent version of events being repeated by all levels of the Russian media machine from the president to the lowliest foot soldier in the Kremlin troll army, Western news editors had little choice but to report it—hence lending that version weight and authority’.87 The open environment of the media in western democracies also enables a hybrid actor's state-owned/controlled media outlets to set up shop in a target country, pay for space in target newspapers or on TV, or buy up local media outlets, with the intention of providing tacit validation for such content. If successful, such a campaign will deepen polarization and may even start to erode the basic legitimacy of democratic governance.
Open economy
While not strictly a feature of liberal democracy, an open market economy has, in practice, become closely associated with western democratic systems.88 As Diamond states, ‘conceptually, a liberal polity is independent of the existence of a competitive, liberal economy based on secure rights of property, although in practice the two are related, in part by their common need to restrict the power of the state’.89 In open, market-based systems, the use of state controls and regulations in the economy remains limited, for example by eliminating or restricting measures such as import prohibitions and rules on foreign investment. Coordination of economic activities is largely decentralized and market-based. Private ownership, including foreign ownership, of the means of production is relatively large. According to liberal economic theory, such open-market conditions will raise economic productivity, and by extension foster economic growth and prosperity.90
However, an open economy also offers fertile ground for hostile foreign actors. Several versatile means exist for interfering with it, depending on the local operating environment. Trade can be used to cultivate loyalty among local businesspeople and help them to gain influence. Through investments, mergers and acquisitions, a resourceful foreign actor can acquire considerable economic presence in a target country, opening up opportunities for further enmeshment, capture and dependence. Both quasi-private and state-owned companies can be used to flexibly penetrate the target economy, taking advantage of a weak local regulatory environment and oversight mechanisms. Where lax ownership disclosure requirements prevail, such activities can be concealed behind a network of shell companies and offshore accounts, masking the true economic penetration of the target economy. In an open economic environment, it may even be possible for a hostile foreign actor to capture strategic sectors of the economy, such as critical infrastructure, finance and media, by which means it will be able to manipulate local economic conditions, generate unfair profits for some local stakeholders while punishing others, and in that way achieve greater political influence.91
Through clandestine diplomacy, disinformation and—particularly—geoeconomics, hostile external actors will attempt to aggravate existing economic cleavages and exploit competition among the diverse set of economic interests that characterizes open, market-based economic systems. These actors can look to a powerful set of local allies in economic circles for means of gaining access to the decision-making process. The variance of interests among local economic forces in market-based systems undermines unity in reference to foreign policy and sustains rifts that external actors can use to manipulate target countries through a combination of economic carrots and sticks.
From the perspective of a hostile external actor, as long as western democracies do not update their security approaches, the key features of these polities—the restrained state, pluralism, free media and an open economy—provide loopholes for covert interference that can be exploited through the tactical combination of clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation. However, it should be remembered that vulnerability does not necessarily entail weakness, and that a particular strength of liberal democracy lies in its inclusive politics and ability to manage change. The open environment of western democracy provides an enabling environment for citizen activism, and herein lies one of its great strengths. NGOs and social movements provide societal democratic mechanisms for monitoring and exposing hybrid interference. The open media environment also performs essential watchdog functions to the same end. Investigative journalism, including new online sources such as Bellingcat, thrives in western democracy. It is by supporting such societal mechanisms that democratic resilience can be strengthened within the confines of the restrained state.
Preventing a hostile actor from exploiting western democratic pluralism to its benefit involves taking a comprehensive perspective on security with the aim of strengthening social cohesion. As a concept, societal security has gained traction lately and fits well with the western democratic model.92 It stems from the belief that inclusive politics and social welfare heal social cleavages and produce societal stability. Policies aimed at social cohesion and welfare should thus form a central part of any hybrid defence efforts.
One pressing issue concerns the monitoring of cyber-enabled meddling in elections. While many governments need to update existing electoral laws (including legislation concerning foreign funding of domestic political parties and associations) to cover meddling tactics, market- and society-based solutions could also be supported to monitor, detect and counteract such meddling. Preventing a hostile external actor from taking advantage of the open economic environment of western democracy also requires the updating of regulations regarding ownership disclosure, mechanisms for the screening of foreign investment, and legislation incorporating national security considerations into foreign investment permit procedures. Financial intelligence units and anti-corruption mechanisms, are important but frequently overlooked tools in building greater resilience against interference. Existing regulation of media competition should also be updated to guard against foreign control of strategic media sectors.
Conclusion
This article has introduced the new concept of hybrid interference to capture the ways in which authoritarian states are targeting liberal democracy by a host of non-military means. Hybrid interference should be distinguished from hybrid warfare, which also involves the use of military means, and in relation to which it may potentially function as an effective priming phase. While the means deployed in hybrid interference—clandestine diplomacy, geoeconomics and disinformation—have been used for strategic ends throughout history, at least three circumstantial enablers make them more effective for wedging purposes today. First, technological advances, particularly cybertechnology, dramatically increase the effectiveness of these means and add new tactical options with high detection and attribution thresholds. Second, the deep interconnectivities that link societies to each other today increase the opportunities for use of these kinds of means. Third, the development of liberal democracy, and particularly its character as an ‘open platform’ through the four essential features listed above—the restrained state, pluralism, free media and an open economy—enables external powers to interfere in western political space through a variety of means. This last enabling circumstance is also why authoritarian powers have a relative advantage over western democracies in applying hybrid interference as a strategic practice. As ‘closed platforms’, they are more able to fend off such external interference. Alarmed by the Arab Spring and the ‘colour revolutions’, both China and Russia have closed ranks in recent years. The Kremlin, in particular, believes that it has been on the receiving end of hybrid interference and that western powers have been using hybrid means to encourage anti-government protests and foment regime change.93 While the possibility cannot be ruled out that western powers themselves may use hybrid interference to drive wedges into authoritarian societies, they will probably find it more difficult to penetrate the political space of the latter. What we may see more frequently are western democracies using hybrid interference against other western democracies. In any case, the three circumstantial enablers—cybertechnology, hyperconnectivity and free-market democracy—have made hybrid interference a tempting strategy. This also means that strengthening resilience against such interference has become a question of immediate importance for the future of liberal democracy.
Over the past few years, the signs of democratic deconsolidation have become unmistakable.94 Even long-established western democracies are being eroded.95 Not only scholars, but increasingly also political leaders and commentators, recognize the growing vulnerability of western democracy.96 There is no consensus on the drivers of this democratic erosion. Standard explanations include rising economic inequality, slowing economic growth, bad governance and cultural transformation; but, as Marc Plattner points out, these seem like ‘rounding up the usual suspects’.97 Many observers note the marked increase in political polarization in recent years, undermining the ‘civic culture’ that has been found to be of paramount importance for efficient democratic governability.98 The rise of populist and nationalist forces has spawned a new identity politics that is threatening liberal democracy from the inside.99 Others have noted that an ‘authoritarian resurgence’ may be undermining democracy from the outside, although scholars have for the most part discarded the idea of ‘autocracy promotion’.100 What has largely been overlooked in the debate on democratic deconsolidation is the idea that the external and internal could somehow be linked.101 It is really only since Russia's meddling in the 2016 US elections that a debate has arisen about the ways in which an external actor can attempt to undermine democracy from within by fomenting political polarization.102 Election meddling is only the most salient example of external interference in western democracy; such interference is going on between elections as well, with the deliberate goal of provoking political polarization, and thereby undermining liberal democratic governability.
Although it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of hybrid interference, it seems to consume substantial resources, which is indicative of its perceived strategic value. There are no doubt a number of explanatory factors contributing to the deepening polarization within western democracies, the transatlantic rifts following the 2016 US elections, and the fissures in the EU embodied by the Brexit vote in the UK and rising anti-EU sentiments in many member states. Yet these are all the kinds of developments that are welcomed by authoritarian powers such as China and Russia, and that hybrid interference as a wedge strategy is equipped to reinforce, as argued in this article. As such, this strategy warrants more research and, above all, counter-measures.
Footnotes
The ‘grey zone’ is a related concept often used in conjunction with hybrid threats. See e.g. ‘Shades of grey: neither war nor peace’, special report, The Economist, 25 Jan. 2018; Rory Cormac and Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black: covert action and implausible deniability’, International Affairs 94: 3, May 2018, pp. 477–94; Lawrence Freedman, ‘The rise and fall of Great Power wars’, International Affairs 95: 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 101–18; Yevgeniy Golovchenko, Mareike Hartmann and Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ‘State, media and civil society in the information warfare over Ukraine: citizen curators of digital disinformation’, International Affairs 94: 5, Sept. 2018, pp. 975–94.
See Guillaume Lasconjarias and Jeffrey A. Larsen, eds, NATO's response to hybrid threats (Rome: NATO Defense College, 2015).
European Commission, Joint framework on countering hybrid threats: a European Union response, joint communication to the European Parliament and the European Council, April 2016, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52016JC0018; European Commission, Joint report on the implementation of the joint framework on countering hybrid threats from July 2017 to June 2018, June 2018, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52018JC0014. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 12 Jan. 2019.)
EU and NATO, ‘Joint declaration by the President of the European Council, the President of the European Commission, and the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’, press release (2016) 119, https://www.nato.int/cps/ic/natohq/official_texts_133163.htm.
Finnish Government Communications Department, ‘European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats established in Helsinki’, press release 159/2017, http://valtioneuvosto.fi/en/article/-/asset_publisher/10616/eurooppalainen-hybridiuhkien-osaamiskeskus-perustettiin-helsinkiin?_101_INSTANCE_3qmUeJgIxZEK_languageId=en_US.
See e.g. Bettina Renz, ‘Russia and “hybrid warfare”’, Contemporary Politics 22: 3, 2016, pp. 283–300; Samuel Charap, ‘The ghost of hybrid warfare’, Survival 57: 6, 2015, pp. 51–8; Damien Van Puyvelde, ‘Hybrid war—does it even exist?’, NATO Review, 2016, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/2015/Also-in-2015/hybrid-modern-future-warfare-russia-ukraine/EN/index.htm.
For a seminal conceptualization of hybrid warfare, using the case of Hezbollah in particular, see Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st century: the rise of hybrid wars (Arlington, VA: Potomac Institute of Policy Studies, 2007).
See e.g. Patryk Babiracki, ‘Putin's postmodern war with the West’, Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2018, https://wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/the-disinformation-age/putins-postmodern-war-with-the-west/.
These means bear similarity to what have been referred to historically as ‘active measures’. For a recent discussion, see Martin Kragh and Sebastian Åsberg, ‘Russia's strategy for influence through public diplomacy and active measures: the Swedish case’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40: 6, 2017, pp. 773–816.
Alexander Lanoszka, ‘Russian hybrid warfare and extended deterrence in eastern Europe’, International Affairs 92: 1, Jan. 2016, pp. 175–95.
See e.g. Antulio J. Echevarria, ‘How we should think about “gray zone” wars’, Infinity Journal 5: 1, 2015, pp. 16–20; Keir Giles, Russia's ‘new’ tools for confronting the West: continuity and innovation in Moscow's exercise of power, research paper (London: Chatham House, 2016); Mark Galeotti, ‘Hybrid, ambiguous, and non-linear? How new is Russia's “new way of war”?’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 27: 2, 2016, pp. 282–301.
NATO, ‘Wales summit declaration’, press release 120, 5 Sept. 2014.
Giles, Russia's ‘new’ tools; Renz, ‘Russia and “hybrid warfare”’.
John J. McCuen, ‘Hybrid wars’, Military Review 88: 2, 2008, pp. 107–13; Williamson Murray and Peter Mansoor, eds, Hybrid warfare: fighting complex opponents from the ancient world to the present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1.
Charap, ‘The ghost of hybrid warfare’; Ofer Fridman, ‘Hybrid warfare or gibridnaya voyna? Similar, but different’, RUSI Journal 162: 1, 2017, pp. 42–9; Renz, ‘Russia and “hybrid warfare”’.
Valery Gerasimov, ‘Tsennost nauki v predvideniye’, Voyenno-promishlenniy kurier, 27 Feb. 2013, https://www.vpk-news.ru/articles/14632; Sergei Chekinov and Sergei Bogdanov, ‘The nature and content of a new-generation war’, Military Thought (Voennaya Mysl’) 4, Oct.–Dec. 2013, pp. 12–23.
András Rácz, Russia's hybrid war in Ukraine: breaking the enemy's ability to resist, FIIA report 32 (Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2015).
Renz, ‘Russia and “hybrid warfare”’, p. 288.
Charap, ‘The ghost of hybrid warfare’.
For the opposing view, see Lanoszka, ‘Russian hybrid warfare’.
Van Puyvelde, ‘Hybrid war—does it even exist?’.
Charap, ‘The ghost of hybrid warfare’; Renz, ‘Russia and “hybrid warfare”’.
Matti Saarelainen, ‘Hybrid threats—what are we talking about’, Hybrid CoE blog, 4 Sept. 2017, https://www.hybridcoe.fi/hybrid-threats-what-are-we-talking-about/.
Gregory F. Treverton, Andrew Thvedt, Alicia R. Chen, Kathy Lee and Madeline McCue, Addressing hybrid threats (Bromma: Swedish Defence University, 2018), https://www.hybridcoe.fi/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Treverton-AddressingHybridThreats.pdf.
See e.g. Jyri Raitasalo, ‘Hybrid warfare: where's the beef?’, War on the Rocks, 23 April 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/04/hybrid-warfare-wheres-the-beef/; Van Puyvelde, ‘Hybrid war—does it even exist?’.
See e.g. Jyri Raitasalo, ‘Getting a grip on the so-called “hybrid warfare”’, ASPJ Africa et Francophonie 8: 3, 2017, pp. 20–39.
See e.g. Rácz, Russia's hybrid war in Ukraine; Roy Allison, ‘Russia and the post-2014 international legal order: revisionism and realpolitik’, International Affairs 93: 3, May 2017, pp. 519–44.
See Galeotti, ‘Hybrid, ambiguous, and non-linear?’.
Ben Nimmo, Russia's full spectrum propaganda (Washington DC: Atlantic Council, 23 Jan. 2018), https://medium.com/dfrlab/russias-full-spectrum-propaganda-9436a246e970.
Jarno Limnéll, ‘The exploitation of cyber domain as part of warfare: Russo-Ukrainian war’, International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics 4: 4, 2015, pp. 521–32.
Christian Fjäder, ‘Interdependence as dependence: economic security in the age of global interconnectedness’, in Mikael Wigell, Sören Scholvin and Mika Aaltola, eds, Geo-economics and power politics in the 21st century: the revival of economic statecraft (London: Routledge, 2019).
Rod Thornton, ‘The changing nature of modern warfare’, RUSI Journal 160: 4, 2015, p. 42.
Kristin Ven Bruusgard, ‘Russian strategic deterrence’, Survival 58: 4, 2016, pp. 7–26.
Gerasimov, ‘Tsennost nauki v predvideniye’. See also Galeotti, ‘Hybrid, ambiguous, and non-linear?’.
This connection is not straightforward, however. Terming acts of aggression hybrid warfare may sometimes be used as justification not to escalate. This may be the case particularly when the aggressor is considered to enjoy escalation dominance.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr, The future of power (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).
Aapo Cederberg, Pasi Eronen and Juha Mustonen, Regional cooperation to support national hybrid defence efforts, working paper no. 1 (Helsinki: European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, 2017), p. 4.
See e.g. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Charly Salonius-Pasternak, An effective antidote: the four components that make Finland more resilient to hybrid campaigns, FIIA comment 19/2017 (Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2017).
See Mikael Wigell and Antto Vihma, ‘Geoeconomics versus geopolitics: the case of Russia's geostrategy and its effects on the EU’, International Affairs 92: 3, May 2016, pp. 605–27.
See e.g. Frank Hoffman, ‘The contemporary spectrum of conflict: protracted, gray zone, ambiguous, and hybrid modes of war’, in 2016 Index of US Military Strength (Washington DC: Heritage Foundation, 2016).
On reflexive control, see Timothy L. Thomas, ‘Russia's reflexive control theory and the military’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 17: 2, 2004, pp. 237–56.
Timothy W. Crawford, ‘Preventing enemy coalitions: how wedge strategies shape power politics’, International Security 35: 4, 2011, pp. 155–89.
Here, ‘strategy’ is taken to mean what Baldwin defines as ‘statecraft’, i.e. ‘the selection of means for the pursuit of [particular] foreign policy goals’. See David Baldwin, Economic statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 8–9.
The term ‘hybrid’ points to how these bundles of different instruments are combined. External interference using just one bundle of instruments, say geoeconomics, is more appropriately referred to as economic interference; or as political interference, if using just clandestine diplomacy, for example. In theory, one could envisage a typology of interference, but space constraints do not permit the development of such a typology here.
See e.g. Peter Kornbluh, ‘Test case for the Reagan Doctrine: the covert Contra war’, Third World Quarterly 9: 4, 1987, pp. 1118–28.
See e.g. Katri Pynnöniemi and Sinikukka Saari, ‘Hybrid influencing—lessons from Finland’, Nato Review, 28 June 2017, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/2017/also-in-2017/lessons-from-finland-influence-russia-policty-security/EN/index.htm. See also Kelly M. Greenhill, Weapons of mass migration: forced displacement, coercion and foreign policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
It is worth noting that the success of covert action does not hinge solely on plausible deniability. There is also a logic underpinning implausible deniability, particularly when it comes to exploiting ambiguity, thereby creating disunity. See Cormac and Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black’.
See Mark Galeotti, ‘The Kremlin's newest hybrid warfare asset: gangsters’, Foreign Policy, 12 June 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/12/how-the-world-of-spies-became-a-gangsters-paradise-russia-cyberattack-hack/.
James Jiann Hua To, Qiaowu: extra-territorial policies for the overseas Chinese (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2014); John Garnaut, ‘China's rulers team up with the notorious “White Wolf” of Taiwan’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 July 2014.
‘Hackers blur line between thief and spy’, Financial Times, 28 March 2016.
On the concept of ‘geoeconomics’, see Sören Scholvin and Mikael Wigell, ‘Power politics by economic means: geo-economics as an analytical approach and foreign policy practice’, Comparative Strategy 37: 1, 2018, pp. 73–84.
Antto Vihma and Mikael Wigell, ‘Unclear and present danger: Russia's geoeconomics and the Nord Stream II pipeline’, Global Affairs 2: 4, 2016, pp. 377–88.
Crawford, ‘Preventing enemy coalitions’; Masanori Hasegawa, ‘The geography and geopolitics of the renminbi: a regional key currency in Asia’, International Affairs 94: 3, May 2018, pp. 535–52.
Wigell and Vihma, ‘Geoeconomics versus geopolitics’.
Richard Weitz, ‘Venemaa hübriidohud uues valguses’ [The Russian hybrid threat revisited], Diplomaatia, nos 149–150, 2016, https://diplomaatia.ee/diplomaatia/arhiiv/.
Alina Polyakova, Marlene Laruelle, Stefan Meister and Neil Barnett, The Kremlin's Trojan horses: Russian influence in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom (Washington DC: Atlantic Council, 2016).
Ann-Marie Brady, Magic weapons: China's political influence activities under Xi Jinping (Washington DC: Wilson Center, Sept. 2017), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping; Clive Hamilton, Silent invasion: China's influence in Australia (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2018).
Hamilton, Silent invasion; see also Heather A. Conley, James Mina, Ruslan Stefanov and Martin Vladimirov, The Kremlin playbook: understanding Russian influence in central and eastern Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
See e.g. Juha Käpylä and Mika Aaltola, ‘Critical infrastructure in geostrategic competition: comparing the US and Chinese Silk Road projects’, in Wigell et al., eds, Geo-economics and power politics in the 21st century, pp. 43–60.
For a discussion, see Mikael Wigell and Ana Soliz Landivar, ‘China's economic statecraft in Latin America: geostrategic implications for the United States’, in Wigell et al., eds, Geo-economics and power politics in the 21st century, pp. 164–81.
Wigell and Soliz Landivar, ‘China's economic statecraft’. See also Conley et al., The Kremlin playbook.
Disinformation needs to be differentiated from misinformation, ‘which is the unintentional dissemination of false information’: Kragh and Åsberg, ‘Russia's strategy for influence’, p. 797.
Kragh and Åsberg, ‘Russia's strategy for influence’.
See e.g. Giles, Russia's ‘new’ tools; Mason Richey, ‘Contemporary Russian revisionism: understanding the Kremlin's hybrid warfare and the strategic and tactical deployment of disinformation’, Asia Europe Journal 16: 1, 2017, pp. 101–13.
See e.g. Keir Giles, Handbook of Russian information warfare (Rome: Nato Defense College, 2016); Nimmo, Russia's full spectrum propaganda; ‘How the Kremlin's disinformation machine is targeting Europe’, Bloomberg News, 16 Dec. 2017.
Hamilton, Silent invasion.
Sheera Frankel, https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/907449274077548549.
For a compilation of cases, see EU vs Disinfo, 2018, http://euvsdisinfo.eu/disinformation-cases/?text=refugees&disinfo_issue=&date=.
See e.g. Pynnöniemi and Saari, ‘Hybrid influencing—lessons from Finland’.
See Stefan Meister, ‘The “Lisa case”: Germany as a target of Russian disinformation’, NATO Review, 2016, https://www.nato.int/docu/review/2016/Also-in-2016/lisa-case-germany-target-russian-disinformation/EN/index.htm.
Mika Aaltola, Democracy's eleventh hour: safeguarding democratic elections against cyber-enabled autocratic meddling, FIIA briefing paper 226/2017 (Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, 2017).
Matthew D'Ancona, Post-truth: the new war on truth and how to fight back (London: Ebury, 2017); Richey, ‘Contemporary Russian revisionism’.
Cass R. Sunstein, #Republic: divided democracy in the age of social media (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Hamilton, Silent invasion.
To, Qiaowu.
See Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and democracy (London: Verso, 1990).
Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner and Andreas Schedler, ‘Introduction’, in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds, The self-restraining state: power and accountability in new democracies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Adam Przeworski, ‘The games of transition’, in Scott Mainwaring, Guillermo O'Donnell and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds, Issues in democratic consolidation: the new South American democracies in comparative perspective (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 116.
Larry Diamond, Developing democracy: toward consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of democratic transition and consolidation: southern Europe, South America, and post-communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 41.
Linz and Stepan, Problems of democratic transition and consolidation.
Diamond, Developing democracy.
Dan Slater, ‘Democratic careening’, World Politics 65: 4, 2013, pp. 729–63.
For a discussion, see Pippa Norris, Driving democracy: do power sharing institutions work? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Sheila Coronel, The role of media in deepening democracy, United Nations Public Administration Network, 2003, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan010194.pdf.
Giles, Russia's ‘new’ tools, p. 35.
Francis Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man (New York: Avon, 1992); Michael Mandelbaum, The ideas that conquered the world: peace, democracy and prosperity in the twenty-first century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
Diamond, Developing democracy, p. 3.
See e.g. Paul R. Krugman, Maurice Obstfeld and Marc J. Melitz, International economics: theory and policy, 10th edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2015).
See Conley et al., The Kremlin playbook.
See Mika Aaltola, Boris Kuznetsov, Andris Sprūds and Elizabete Vizgunova, eds, Societal security in the Baltic Sea region (Riga: Latvian Institute of International Affairs, 2018).
Thornton, ‘The changing nature of modern warfare’.
Larry Diamond, ‘Facing up to democratic recession’, Journal of Democracy 26: 1, 2015, pp. 142–55; Valeriya Mechkova, Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg, ‘How much democratic backsliding’, Journal of Democracy 28: 4, 2017, pp. 162–9.
Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, ‘The signs of democratic deconsolidation’, Journal of Democracy 28: 1, 2017, pp. 5–15.
‘Democracy's decline’, The Economist, 16 June 2018.
For a discussion, see Marc Plattner, ‘Liberal democracy's fading allure’, Journal of Democracy 28: 4, 2017, p. 7.
See e.g. Slater, ‘Democratic careening’.
Francis Fukuyama, Identity: the demand for dignity and the politics of resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018); William A. Galston, Anti-pluralism: the populist challenge to liberal democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
André Bank, ‘The study of authoritarian diffusion and cooperation: comparative lessons on interests versus ideology, nowadays and in history’, Democratization 24: 7, 2017. pp. 1345–57; Jason Brownlee, ‘The limited reach of authoritarian powers’, Democratization 24: 7, 2017, pp. 1326–44.
For an exception, see Christopher Walker, ‘What is sharp power?’, Journal of Democracy 29: 3, 2018, pp. 9–23.
Aaltola, Democracy's eleventh hour; Nathaniel Persily, ‘Can democracy survive the internet?’, Journal of Democracy 28: 2, 2017, pp. 63–76; ‘The meddler’, The Economist, 24 Feb. 2018.
Author notes
The author is indebted to Hanna Smith, Charly Salonius-Pasternak, Antto Vihma and the researchers at the Changing Character of War Centre (Pembroke College, Oxford University) for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
