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The international security environment has in recent years evolved into a volatile and increasingly grey zone of war and peace. Security challenges arising from hybrid threats and hybrid warfare, henceforth HT&HW, are today high on security agendas across the globe. However, despite the attention, and a growing body of studies on specific issues, there is an imminent need for research bringing attention to how these challenges can be addressed in order to develop a comprehensive approach towards identifying, analysing and countering HT&HW. This volume supports the development of such an approach by bringing together practitioners and scholarly perspectives on HT&HW, by covering the threats themselves as well as the tools and means to counter them together with a number of real-world case studies. Over time the grey zone between peace and war has grown considerably, underscoring the necessity of understanding hybrid warfare and related threats. Russia's actions in Ukraine have manifested this paradigm, being a good example of the problem in thinking about war and peace as binary categories. How does a country or group of countries deal with threats and aggression in this grey area, such as 'little green men' that appear in uniform but without national denomination and refuse to tell where they come from, election-influenced operations or cyberattacks, to mention but a few possible actions. By uniting the knowledge of both practitioners and scholars, the volume aims to identify the existing tools for countering HT&HW, as well as experiences from a wide set of empirical contexts. Mirroring this, the project is a cross-sector collaboration between the Department of Military Studies and the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS) at the Swedish Defence University. The former represents an academic environment where research and teaching are intertwined in a range of subjects including War Studies, Military Technology and Military History. The latter is a national centre within the Swedish Defence University tasked with developing and disseminating knowledge about asymmetric threats within the context of societal security and resilience. This volume focuses on the challenge posed by HT&HW to Western democracies, and their ability to address it. Western democracies are not only the type of states most frequently targeted by hybrid measures, but also the most vulnerable. By virtue of being open, pluralistic and liberal societies with freedom of the press and rule of law, Western democracies display both inherent weaknesses that can be targeted and inherent constraints – in particular through the rule of law and basic freedoms – that limit the scope for defensive actions. These vulnerabilities are increasingly recognized by Western governments, which have developed a range of entities to address them, although coordination in many instances remains weak. The later sections outline the growing significance of HT&HW on the security agendas of Western democracies and the challenges they imply, as well as the entities these states have established in response. Although neither list is complete, they provide an overview of the current situation. The final sections provide an outline of the volume's structure and a summary of each chapter.

This article first traces the origin of hybrid warfare and the label game surrounding the concept, asking whether it is merely old wine in a new bottle, and if so, whether it is still a useful concept. It is found that while being old wine in new bottles, it is still a good wine well worth drinking. While there is not much new in the concept itself, it is a useful tool to think about past wars, today's wars and the wars of the future. Thereafter, this paper analyses how hybrid warfare and hybrid threats are to be understood in the context of peace, conflict and war. It is shown how hybrid warfare and threats fit into our traditional understanding of conflict dynamics.

This article presents the study of ambiguity as the essence of hybrid warfare to reconcile it with the international political context. It addresses the gaps in the literature in an effort to elucidate the essence of hybrid warfare not as a separate concept, but rather as the symptom of a changing political environment. The analysis of the literature is reinforced by two case studies: the war in eastern Ukraine of 2014 and the South China Sea dispute. Both these case studies express ambiguity in the combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means used to achieve political objectives. The article rests on three pillars which constitute the architecture of the central argument. The first pillar will address the gap in the current literature on hybrid warfare and how the current debate is too concerned with conflict dynamics rather than its political nature. The second pillar will delineate the essence, characteristics and value of ambiguity in hybrid warfare. The third pillar will address the practice of hybrid warfare as the conduct of war by great powers.

Preface --Summary --Acknowledgments --1.Introduction --2.What Is Hybrid Warfare? --3.Hybrid Scenarios:Nonviolent Subversion --Covert Violent Action --Conventional Aggression Supported by Political Subversion --4.Policy Implications:Integration of Russians --Countering Covert Action --Avoiding the Risk of Conventional Deterrence Initiatives Fomenting Irregular Provocation --References.

The course of present armed conflicts indicates the use of different instruments of power, whose major purpose is to gain control over the society and then exploit its resources. The nomenclature mentions hybrid warfare more and more frequently while seeking effective countermeasures against it. This topic is related to the creation of a new structure in the Polish Army – the Territorial Defence Force. The article presents the determinants conditioning the creation of the discussed formation and its assigned tasks. It analyses the expected objectives of the Territorial Defence Force as regards the adopted organisational structure, capability to perform its tasks and the established recruitment and training system. The article focuses in particular on countering tools of attack used in hybrid actions. The author refers to the course of events during modern asymmetric armed conflicts, for example in eastern Ukraine. Methods used by a potential enemy and the possible countermeasures exercised by the Territorial Defence Force are taken into consideration. The conclusions include an assessment of the importance of the new formation for Polish national security and defence.

Contemporary terrorism is characterised by a complex and networked model of operation. While the main objectives of terrorist acts remain the same, the attack environment, tactics and tools are changing. The international community is taking steps to strengthen counter-terrorism systems, but these are peaceful solutions. These models do not consider the conditions of hybrid armed conflicts in which terrorism is an element of combat tactics. It is a relatively new phenomenon and particularly dangerous for the civilian population. The acts of terror in hybrid warfare are not mechanisms with a simple scheme of action, and, as we try to show in this article, they represent a deliberate and broad spectrum of action. Therefore, there is an urgent need to understand terrorism in the context of the threat of hybrid war (especially when terrorist acts complement hybrid tactics or significantly replace conventional tactics). This type of threat must be recognised before achieving its strategic goals. From the substantive point of view, the article studies the problem of terrorism as one of the threats of an armed conflict in Ukraine, commonly known as hybrid war.

Abstract
This article first traces the origin of hybrid warfare and the label game surrounding the concept, asking whether it is merely old wine in a new bottle, and if so, whether it is still a useful concept. It is found that while being old wine in new bottles, it is still a good wine well worth drinking. While there is not much new in the concept itself, it is a useful tool to think about past wars, today's wars and the wars of the future. Thereafter, this paper analyses how hybrid warfare and hybrid threats are to be understood in the context of peace, conflict and war. It is shown how hybrid warfare and threats fit into our traditional understanding of conflict dynamics.

Russia and China are terraforming the maritime environment as part of their warfare. In both cases the actions are illegal and the performance is offensive to its actual nature. In the case of China, the practice is construction of artificial islands in the South Chinese Sea and in the case of Russia it is about the infamous bridge built over the Kerch strait, Ukraine. Neither Russia nor China expects an armed conflict with the West in the near future. That is a reasonable assumption, which is weaponized at the political-strategically level. The attack of this weaponized situation is that the trust in the West. Primarily the EU (European Union) and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), is eroded for every day which these countries challenges the international system which the western democracies say that they present and defend. China and Russia offer their authoritarian systems as a replacement and there are a lot of pseudo-democratic or even out-right authoritarian regimes on the sideline watching this challenge unfold. The article highlights the difference for the NATO-countries in logic of practice when it comes to the political social field on one hand and the military political field on the other hand. The article uses material from a previously unpublished survey made on NATO-officers then attending courses at NATO Defense College (NDC).

After the Second World War, the nature of interstate confrontation has changed: the basis was not military means, but information and psychological operations. This is the so-called hybrid war, which does not require a declaration, but it can turn prosperous states into the arena of armed struggle, bringing them to the brink of humanitarian disaster or civil war.

The book review is dedicated to a work that tackles one of the trendiest concepts of recent times. The book concentrates on the conceptualization of the notion of hybrid war and its perception on both sides of the Atlantic. The declared goal of the book was to investigate how political forces have shaped conceptual thinking between the West and Russia and explain the reasons for mutual criminations. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods the author examined large amounts of literature and took an exploratory approach to dig into categorical data from both American and Russian thinkers' works then compared the conceptual usage of them.