Event Recap: Hybrid Warfare and the New Face of Conflict
The Droned Life team at the pre-symposium collaborator meeting. Left to right from top row: Beryl Pong, Marjory da Costa-Abreu, Joanna Tidy, Amy Gaeta, Nick Bax, Richard Carter, Lucas Bax. Bottom row: Peter Burt, Gill Webber, Michael Hoeschen.
Since the publication of Frank Hoffman’s 2007 paper, “Conflict in the Twenty-First Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars”—which by no means offered the first use of “hybrid warfare,” but did mark one of the most influential uses—the term has been re-conceptualized, contested, and expanded in ways that risk vagueness of meaning. In fact, the term’s evolution captures the capaciousness and nebulousness of what it is trying to describe—aspects of conflict that seem to trouble or collapse perceived boundaries between war and peace, combatant and non-combatant, kinetic and non-kinetic activity, and other distinctions that have been key to defining ideas of war. As such, it joins a host of other recent terms, such as “full-spectrum conflict” (Jonsson and Seely 2015), “non-linear war” (Galeotti 2016), “greyzone war” (Echevarria 2016), and “liminal war” (Kilcullen 2020), among others, which attempt to explore the various modes of communication and experience, and material and non-material theatres, that constitute contemporary conflict. In one study, which analyses the way hybrid warfare as a term is used by actors connected to British military and defence, the authors noted that usage tends to emphasise certain aspects like disinformation, misinformation, influence operations, psychological operations, sabotage, media manipulation, and propaganda (Janicatova and Mlejnkova 2021).
The event took place at the roof terrace of the Imperial War Museum.
On 18 November 2023, in the first collaborative annual event between the Centre for Drones and Culture (CDAC) and the Imperial War Museum’s (IWM) Institute for the Public Understanding of War and Conflict, we hosted the symposium “From Sniper to Smartphone: Hybrid Warfare and the New Face of Conflict.” Moderated by BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera, the event began with a roundtable debate on the histories, theories, and interpretations of “hybrid warfare” with Matthew Ford, Mark Galeotti, and Chiara Libiseller. Speakers touched on the need to examine what is “new” and unique about hybrid warfare. One refrain was that digital interconnectivity provided new opportunities and risks for engaging in hybrid warfare, and that mobile technologies like smartphones and related data infrastructures meant that one could participate in hybrid warfare without necessarily being aware of their doing so. Speakers also argued that aspects of hybrid warfare can sometimes be intermingled or conflated with “actual” war in a cycle of mutual escalation.
From left to right: Matthew Ford, Mark Galeotti, Gordon Corera, Chiara Libiseller.
Because hybrid warfare can be a slippery concept, and because Russia is often discussed as a paradigmatic hybrid warfare actor in Western media, Corera then spoke to Olga Tokariuk about the Russia-Ukraine conflict which began in 2014 and developed into invasion in 2022. Much of Russia’s war against Ukraine happens in the information space, and Tokariuk discussed hybrid warfare as actual lived experience, including some of the strategies that Ukrainian civilians take to “pre-bunk” influence campaigns.
Gordon Corera (left) speaking to Olga Tokariuk (right).
The third segment of the symposium focused on the roles of artificial intelligence in what some call the new global arms race. Here, Elke Schwarz and Kerry McInerney emphasized that AI needs to be understood as a range of techniques and concepts, not just that of autonomous weapons like drones. The speakers drew attention to the fact that most AI innovations occur in the private sector, and that governments and states need to retain oversight. That is, “we cannot treat adversarial misuse of autonomous AI operation as an excuse to abandon conflict ethics as political luxury,” as CDAC Co-Investigator Richard Carter reflects.
From left to right: Kerry McInerney, Gordon Corera, Elke Schwarz
The symposium ended with a wide-ranging roundtable discussion between Chris Cole, Samir Puri, Carl Miller, and Jessikka Aro on hybrid warfare’s relationship to data, drones, and disinformation. A recurrent theme was the role of the individual and how they might relate to or respond to the use of hybrid warfare, especially when it comes to disinformation, which tends to confirm individual beliefs and biases especially on social media. Speakers debated the need for transparency when it comes to not only non-state but state uses of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems.
From left to right: Chris Cole, Samir Puri, Gordon Corera, Carl Miller, Jessikka Aro.
For Carter, the symposium’s topics connected to his own creative practice, which centres on how the arts can help to understand established and emerging technologies in a new light. In particular, he queries the way technological trends, applications, and consequences are sometimes presented as “inevitabilities”:
The symposium gave me cause for reflecting on the importance of not simply resisting notions that certain technologies are synonymous with "disruptive" socio-technical "progress" but also, by the same token, the idea that a necessary cost of their emergence is an extension and intensification of military practices - to find ways of reaffirming how there is nothing inevitable about our present and future worlds.
For CDAC’s Research Associate, Amy Gaeta, the event aligned with her interest in the proliferation of military technologies in civilian and commercial sectors:
I was most interested in the discussion of the 21st-century battlefield and how civilians, both those immediately affected by conflict and those seemingly safe abroad in liberal democracies like the US and UK, partake in present-day processes of militarization and war. This encouraged me to ask about the visibilities of warfare today: where does war end and where does it begin—spatially, temporally, and psychologically? Along with that, what are the ethics of civilian engagement in wars with no clear boundaries? […] It is evident that civilian-military relations are in a state of change and that this shift can be a site to rethink how the current global information and technological ecosystem, from the levels of production to regulation, affects the ways we all differently engage with war and how war differently engages with us.
The Droned Life team outside the Imperial War Museum.
Throughout the event, CDAC team members conducted brief interviews with members of the public to gauge and explore different takes on the critical issues surrounding AI, autonomy, and “hybrid” conflicts. Information from these interviews and from event surveys will be analysed by IWM and CDAC and shared at a later date. This event is part of our ongoing efforts to engage the urgent challenges and opportunities of using a term like “hybrid warfare” amid our larger exploration of the experiences, affects, and ethics of an ever-expanding battlefield.
Images courtesy of the Centre for Drones and Culture and the Imperial War Museum.