Countering hybrid warfare as ontological security management: The emerging practices of the EU and NATO

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What are the ethical pitfalls of countering hybrid warfare? This article proposes an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats. It illustrates how hybrid threat management collapses their daily security struggles into ontological security management exercise. This has major consequences for defining the threshold of an Article 5 attack and the related response for NATO, and the maintenance of a particular symbolic order and identity narrative for the EU. The institutionalisation of hybrid threat counteraction emerges as a routinisation strategy to cope with the “known unknowns”. Fostering resilience points at the problematic prospect of compromising the fuzzy distinction between politics and war: the logic of hybrid conflicts presumes that all politics could be reduced to a potential build-up phase for a full-blown confrontation. Efficient hybrid threat management faces the central paradox of militant democracy whereby the very attempt to defend democracy might harm it.
Original languageEnglish
JournalEuropean Security
Volume27
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)374-392
Number of pages18
ISSN0966-2839
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 3 Jul 2018

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - hybrid warfare, ontological security, resilience, EUROPEAN UNION, NATO, International Relations theory

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