Conference “Hybrid Threats – Countering Complexity in an Interconnected World”

The character of armed conflict has shifted markedly since the end of the Cold War. Where interstate war once revolved around the seizure of territory by uniformed armies, contemporary conflict increasingly unfolds across overlapping domains — cyber, information, economic, legal, and cognitive — alongside kinetic operations. The term 'hybrid warfare' gained currency after Hezbollah's 2006 confrontation with Israel and was reinforced by Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which combined unmarked special forces, cyber intrusions, energy coercion, and disinformation. Analysts at NATO, the EU Hybrid CoE in Helsinki (established 2017), and the UN have since documented similar patterns from the South China Sea's 'grey-zone' maritime tactics to Iranian proxy networks across the Levant and the use of private military companies such as the Wagner Group in Africa. The core dispute is twofold. First, hybrid activity is designed to remain below the threshold of armed attack as defined by Article 51 of the UN Charter, frustrating collective response mechanisms built for conventional aggression. Second, attribution is deliberately obscured: states can deny responsibility for cyber operations, proxy militias, or troll farms while still achieving strategic effect. This creates a legal and political vacuum in which international humanitarian law, the law of state responsibility, and Security Council enforcement tools struggle to apply cleanly. Recent cases — the 2022 invasion of Ukraine with its parallel cyber and energy fronts, suspected sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, alleged interference in elections across Europe and Africa, and instrumentalised migration flows on the Belarus–Poland border — have intensified calls for updated doctrine. Today the debate centres on how the international community should define, deter, and respond to multidimensional threats without lowering the threshold for legitimate use of force or eroding civil liberties at home. Proposals range from clarifying thresholds under existing international law, strengthening attribution capacities and sanctions regimes, building societal resilience against disinformation, and regulating private military and cyber actors. Divisions persist between states that view hybrid tools as illegitimate coercion and those that see Western framing of 'hybrid threats' as itself a politicised concept used to justify intervention.