Politics of Hybrid Warfare

This book offers a timely and trenchant addition to the vanguard of critical political thought in Central Europe. Reclaiming politics from the logic of war, the book provides a sobering cut into the political work of hybrid warfare discourse. With its theoretical sophistication and thick empirical embeddedness in the stories from the ‘in-between zone’ of Czechia, this is a must-read for untangling the lazy causality between the problems with Western democracies and Russian subversive actions.

 -Maria Mälksoo, University of Copenhagen

This is a first book-long analysis showing how the notion of ‘hybrid warfare’ was used to transform security policies and discourses in an EU/NATO country. Building on current debates in International Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, it provides a novel account of how crisis, geopolitics, uncertainty, and expertise are intertwined in the social construction of threats. Based on extensive and original empirical research of large textual archive and elite interviews in the Czech Republic and Brussels, the book shows how officials, bureaucrats, journalists, activists, and experts all participate in the reshaping of security in a new geopolitical environment. Zooming on the case of Czechia and its specific Central European context, it complements the predominantly Western-centric studies of insecurity with an account of how the liminal position on an East/West boundary influences security politics. As a first study of its kind and scope, it will be of interest to academics and students interested in Central European politics, practices and discourses of hybrid warfare, as well as critical approaches to security and geopolitics.

Jakub Eberle is Research Director and Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. He works on IR theory, Czech and German foreign policy, and politics of Central Europe. He is the author of Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War (2019).

Jan Daniel is Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. His research mostly draws on International Political Sociology and Critical Security and Peace Studies and focuses on politics of (in)security in Central Europe and the Middle East.