definition of armed conflict in political science

Hybrid warfare below the threshold of war or direct overt violence pays dividends despite being easier, cheaper, and less risky than kinetic operations. War becomes elusive as it becomes difficult to operationalise it. This means that it is hard to identify or discern the war threshold. First, the line between war and peace time is rendered obscure. Furthermore, there are two distinct characteristics of hybrid warfare. The objective of conflating kinetic tools and non-kinetic tactics is to inflict damage on a belligerent state in an optimal manner. These instruments or tools are blended in a synchronised manner to exploit the vulnerabilities of an antagonist and achieve synergistic effects.

To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion. Nevertheless, the concept furnishes us with key insights into contemporary and future security and defence challenges. It has been subjected to a lot of criticism for lacking conceptual clarity, being merely a catch-all phrase or a buzzword, and not brining anything distinctly new to policy debates.

Hybrid warfare remains a contested concept and there is no universally agreed definition of it. Second, Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and achieved its objectives by virtue of conflating “deniable” special forces, local armed actors, economic clout, disinformation, and exploitation of socio-political polarisation in Ukraine. First, in 2005, two US military officials wrote about the “ rise of hybrid wars” and emphasised the combination of conventional and unconventional strategies, methods, and tactics in contemporary warfare as well as the psychological or information-related aspects of modern conflicts. Before we delve into the concept, it is important to highlight that hybrid warfare in the contemporary era became increasingly popular in policy debates following two important developments.

Definition of armed conflict in political science