Description
This article considers the emergence of ‘hybrid warfare’ as a concept in international relations in the 21st century. First, I consider how the claim that hybrid warfare has ‘erased the boundary between war and peace,’ is constructed through a dramaturgy of revelation and scandal in which ostensibly secret strategic knowledge is brought to light. Second, I argue that the presumed novelty of hybrid war obscures longstanding observations of war's ontological slippage, producing an imagined status quo in which Western nations observe a strict delimitation between war and peace. Third, I argue that, in 'hybrid' space between war and peace, war is assumed to take ontological primacy over peace. Finally, I argue that the concept of hybrid war allows for the suspension of war's contradictory ontologies in uneven geographical imaginations of civilisational and ethical difference. I conclude that, more than an empirical or epistemological problem, the ontology of war remains a fundamentally political question.
