Hybrid Operations

In recent years policymakers, warfighters, and academics have increasingly become interested in the subject of hybrid warfare. For our purposes we are broadly defining hybrid warfare as the combined use of military and non-military means to achieve a state’s political objectives or foreign policy goals. Recent examples include the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006 (known also as the 2006 Lebanon war) and the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In the English-speaking world, hybrid warfare is frequently discussed in terms that include kinetic efforts such as gray zone operations, irregular warfare, counter irregular warfare, covert action, sensitive activities, special operations, proxy warfare, and unrestricted warfare. Other overlapping areas include terms such as information warfare, lawfare, cognitive warfare, total defense, and military operations other than war (MOOTW), among many others. A common concept is the (often unacknowledged) use of violence or coercion to achieve a state’s strategic outcomes.

Many qualitative and quantitative studies have addressed not only hybridity in warfare, but also Hybrid Threats, or the mixture of coercive and subversive activity, conventional and unconventional methods (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, technological), which can be used in a coordinated manner by state or non-state actors to achieve specific objectives while remaining below the threshold of formally declared warfare.[1] Although a number of publications have sought to create lexicons or elaborate conceptual frameworks allowing for rigorous analysis of hybrid war and hybrid threats, few authors have so far analyzed and tried to assess the effectiveness of actual operations and relevant countermeasures.

To fill in this gap in the academic literature, Connections, the journal of the Partnership for Peace Consortium, invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to Hybrid Operations. We welcome original articles analyzing comprehensively both successful and unsuccessful hybrid operations, the effectiveness of countermeasures, and lesson learned to support future operations. Authors may cover, but are not limited to:

• Coup attempts, e.g., in Montenegro and sub-Saharan Africa
• Other examples of state capture
• Achievement, or riddance of energy dependence, e.g., of Europe, on a single supplier of energy resources
• Threats to economic security and financial independence
• Dependencies of supply chains, including raw materials
• Disinformation campaigns
• Multi-domain combinations in hybrid operations
• Cognitive warfare
• Disruption and non-linear forms of confliction
• Comprehensive defense, total defense and other strategies to counter hybrid operations
• Civil-military cooperation and whole-of-society doctrines and applications
• Questions related to detection, determination or attribution
• Rise of intensity of hybrid threats and security-defense continuum

This special issue will be edited by Prof. Todor Tagarev, Dr. Julien Theron, and Dr. Andrew Borene 

We invite authors to submit their manuscripts as soon as they are ready. Manuscripts should be original texts in the range of 4,000 to 7,000 words, in the English language, written in a lucid and clear style for a target audience of informed defense and security affairs practitioners and academics. Please use the template below to prepare your manuscript. 

Submitted manuscripts will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer-review process to ensure the quality and relevance of the contributions. Articles will also undergo a military prepublication review, to prevent the publication of classified or sensitive information.

Upon approval, articles will be published online as ‘previews’ and will be citable. The printed publication is scheduled for Winter 2026.

Additional author guidance is available on the Connections website at https://connections-qj.org/guide-authors

For inquiries and submission-related matters, please contact connections@marshallcenter.org