Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict Symposium – The Challenge for Liberal Democracies
The idea of great power competition is now a prominent lens through which to view international relations. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reminds us that such rivalry may take an intensely violent form. Large-scale conflict has not gone away. Most geopolitical competition today, however, takes the form of continuous contestation below the threshold of armed conflict, in which major States use various aggressive and sometimes coercive means to gain advantage and influence.
This post introduces a series based on our recent book, Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict: The Challenge to Liberal Democracies published with Oxford University Press.
Hybrid Threats and Grey Zone Conflict
The terms “hybrid threats” and “grey zone conflict” are the most common terms to describe this activity, but they focus on different dimensions of the phenomenon.
Hybrid threats refer to actions that involve combined efforts across multiple dimensions—political, cyber, disinformation, military, financial, and others—to harm a State by attacking its vulnerabilities through measures that are more hostile and aggressive than widely accepted forms of competition but are below the level of armed conflict.
The grey zone is the area on the spectrum of conflict where these activities occur, located where peace gradually begins to blend into war as competition becomes more aggressive and coercive. The grey zone conceptualizes these two states of affairs as divided not by a single line, but by a wider ambiguous zone that combines both peaceful and warlike features. Each concept thus highlights certain features of the current security environment, with corresponding advantages and limitations, in a complementary fashion.
International Law: Caught in the Middle?
Contemporary geopolitical competition often involves capitalizing on gaps in international law or ambiguous legal rules. This underscores that international law is not a set of rules that stands above the tumble of great power politics, attempting to constrain it with greater or lesser success. Rather, it is an integral part of geopolitical rivalry. States invest in international law because it defines the terms of their competition. The rules of international law reflect value preferences and choices about political objectives. They provide principled justifications for policy action, thus serving as a source of legitimacy and, equally, a means for delegitimizing competitors. This is important to both democratic and autocratic powers.
Strategic competition in the legal domain is not a confrontation between those who favour rules and those who prefer a world without them. At stake is not the choice between a legal order and one without law, but the shape, content, and operation of the rules that make up that order. Liberal democracies are committed to what is often described as a “thick” or “substantive” understanding of the rule of law. Not only should the exercise of public authority and social life more generally be governed by rules that are equally applicable to all, but such laws must also carry the democratically expressed consent of the population and respect fundamental rights and freedoms. This commitment to the rule of law and associated principles such as good governance, political pluralism, and human rights, is widely seen as the normative lifeblood that sustains the political vitality and moral strength of liberal democracies.
By contrast, such a thick understanding of the rule of law is an anathema to autocratic governments. A genuine commitment to respect democracy, political pluralism, and human rights, as the West understands and (for the most part) practices is incompatible with regime survival. Russia and China consequently promote State-centric principles of international law at the expense of human rights. For example, their Declaration on the Promotion of International Law of 2016 champions the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention in the internal or external affairs of States, but without any reference to human rights.
The idea that autocratic regimes threaten the very survival of the international legal system thus misrepresents the nature of the challenge: the risk that liberal democracies are facing is not a lawless world, but one beset by the weakening of key norms of coexistence, and where the prevailing rules and institutions reflect authoritarian preferences and interests.
The Volume
Our book grapples with these themes in a way that seeks to clarify the common ground between the notion of hybrid threats and grey zone conflict and elucidate the legal challenges they raise.
The volume brings together 39 thinkers from thirteen countries and various disciplines and backgrounds to explore some of the most pressing legal and ethical questions that hybrid threats and grey zone conflict pose. In doing so, the volume has two aims. The first is to provide readers with an understanding of the key concepts, trends, and dynamics at work, thus addressing the overall picture. The second is to offer a detailed analysis of certain questions of particular interest, thereby providing depth and granularity.
A prominent theme running through the chapters is the idea of hybrid and grey zone competition as a phenomenon that exploits the distinctive vulnerabilities of liberal democracies as relatively open societies and the weaknesses of the international legal system. Activities of this nature are aimed at avoiding a clear legal characterization, which in turn renders a decisive response more difficult. Liberal democracies’ commitment to a thick understanding of the rule of law demands they refrain from measures that would undermine the very values they seek to uphold. However, playing by the rules may impose a competitive penalty on liberal democracies and put them at the mercy of the weak mechanisms of the international legal system.
The challenges in applying conventional legal categories to grey zone activity underscore the need to consider basic liberal democratic ethical principles and how they might inform the development of legal concepts that more accurately reflect the underlying concerns raised by such activity. Gaining greater clarity about how the international community should characterize conduct in legal terms requires an appreciation of the fundamental ethical concerns that are the basis for legal categories. In other words, what are the normative commitments that legal rules are meant to express, and how are they implicated in the terrain that the volume explores? The arena of armed conflict is governed by a well-developed set of rules that reflects relatively clear ethical principles, but there is much less consensus on the norms that should govern competition outside this arena.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part brings together contributions that address the conceptual foundations and core assumptions of hybrid threats and grey zone conflict. The second part concerns key arenas of hybrid and grey zone competition. The third part of the volume consists of chapters assessing the instruments, tactics, and methods used in hybrid and grey zone competition. The fourth and final part of the book focuses on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that liberal democracies face in their efforts to counter hybrid and grey zone threats.
Chapter Summaries
We are pleased that Articles of War will feature summaries of four chapters from the volume that highlight some of the issues that will be of particular interest to its audience. In his post, Professor David Letts sets out to highlight some of the major themes his chapter addresses regarding the maritime domain. The chapter focuses on State actions, particularly in the South China Sea, where powers like China use ambiguity to mask the legal nature of their operations, such as building and militarizing artificial islands. As Professor Letts explains, States often exploit legal vulnerabilities to gain advantages without resorting to open warfare. For him, one of the key issues in this context is how these tactics challenge the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Although unable to offer a definite solution to these challenges, he warns that they will demand our attention for the foreseeable future.
In “Rethinking Coercion in Cyberspace,” Professor Ido Kilovaty highlights the inadequacy of the traditional international law standard of coercion—central to the principle of non-intervention—for addressing cyber operations. Traditionally, coercion distinguishes lawful interference from unlawful intervention by requiring forceful actions that deprive a State of its freedom to make decisions. However, modern cyber operations—such as disinformation campaigns, election manipulation, or disruption of critical infrastructure—often operate below that threshold, yet still destabilize and undermine sovereign States. Professor Kilovaty argues that coercion is no longer sufficient to capture the full spectrum of harmful cyber interference. Instead, the international community should consider new standards, such as disruption and manipulation. Professor Kilovaty encourages us to rethink the existing rules and how we may adapt international law to technological advancements and sociopolitical changes.
Professor Hitoshi Nasu’s chapter explores the persistent threat of grey zone operations, even amid full-scale wars like those in Ukraine and Gaza. Professor Nasu argues that grey zone tactics exploit the structural weaknesses of international law, where legal frameworks and standards are fragmented, allowing States to obscure the legality of their actions. Advanced technologies, like artificial intelligence and information warfare, exacerbate this issue, making it harder to attribute hostile activities to a State. His post and chapter also highlight the challenges hybrid threats pose, especially in the legal characterization of conflicts, where non-State actors, proxy forces, and ambiguity about the threshold of armed conflict complicate legal responses. He concludes that mere advocacy for compliance is insufficient, as deeper structural dynamics are at work in this context.
Finally, Professor Melissa K. Griffith turns to the role of cyber operations, particularly in the ambiguous “grey zones” between war and peace, crime and statecraft, and espionage and attacks. Professor Griffith identifies three key grey zones where cyber operations thrive: first, the “messy middle” between war and peace, where cyber activities allow States to influence and destabilize targets without direct military engagement; second, the blurred line between crime and statecraft, where States use cybercriminal methods, like ransomware, to fund strategic goals (e.g., North Korea’s hacking of financial institutions and Russian ransomware groups); and third, the overlap between espionage and attacks, which complicates the task of distinguishing between spying and preparation for cyberattacks, as seen in the SolarWinds hack. Professor Griffith concludes that cyber operations are not accidental but calibrated carefully to exploit legal and technical ambiguities.
Conclusion
Hybrid threats and grey zone conflict will continue to be a persistent challenge to international law as States devise innovative ways to gain advantage and harm adversaries, in a manner that international law often cannot easily categorize. Our aim in this volume is to present a survey of these phenomena, suggest potential frameworks for rigorously analysing them, and identify the underlying ethical concerns that may inform such analysis.
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Mitt Regan is McDevitt Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Center on National Security at Georgetown Law Center, and Senior Fellow at the Stockdale Center on Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy.
Dr. Aurel Sari is an Associate Professor of Public International Law at the University of Exeter and a Fellow of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.
Photo credit: Pexels, OUP
