The Rise and Fall of ‘Hybrid Warfare’

Abstract This chapter traces the ‘hybrid warfare’ concept from 2007 to 2023. While developed around 2007, the term became fashionable only in 2014, after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea. NATO and the EU adopted and adapted the term to suggest that Russia had found a new, promising approach to achieve its political aims without having to recur to the use of force. Across practitioners and academics, a widespread belief that Russia had successfully used hybrid warfare led to threat inflation and superficial engagement with events in Ukraine. Academic interest in the concept skyrocketed and ever-more topics and means were linked to the ‘hybrid warfare’ concept, increasing its breadth and eventually emptying it of any analytical value. This chapter also specifically looks at the effects that the politicization of a concept has on academic research.