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Global Politics and Strategy
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War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction
Chiara Libiseller & Lukas Milevski
To cite this article: Chiara Libiseller & Lukas Milevski (2021) War and Peace: Reaffirming the
Distinction, Survival, 63:1, 101-112, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2021.1881256
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In recent years, the idea that the boundaries between war and peace are
blurring has gained favour in the field of strategic studies. Concepts such
as ‘hybrid warfare’ and the ‘grey zone’ have captured the perceived ambiguity.
According to their champions, Western strategic thought has been
constrained by a flawed binary distinction between war and peace, while
other actors – mainly Russia and China – have become more flexible in their
strategic thinking and intentionally exploit the limitations of the Western
conception. These commentators contend that the West needs to replace the
artificial dichotomy of war and peace with a continuum of war and peace to
meet new challenges.1
Certainly, concepts and categories are arbitrary. Reality does not dictate
them; they are intellectual constructs of our choice.2
They cannot be definitively
true or false but only more or less useful.3
After reviewing the criticism
of the traditional distinction between war and peace that these two recent
concepts have prompted, we argue that they have blurred the boundaries
between the two. In fact, the traditional understanding of war and peace
based on Carl von Clausewitz’s theory – in particular, its emphasis on the
role of agency and intentions – leads to a clear and policy-relevant understanding
of war and its boundaries, and offers a more useful approach to
confronting the myriad means and effects that are currently subsumed
War and Peace: Reaffirming the
Distinction
Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
Chiara Libiseller is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. Lukas Milevski
is an assistant professor at the Institute for History at Leiden University, and author of The Evolution of Modern
Grand Strategic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Survival | vol. 63 no. 1 | February–March 2021 | pp. 101–112https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2021.1881256
102 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
under the concepts of hybrid war and grey-zone conflict, as well as a more
systematic approach to understanding war.
Unsettling war
There is a tendency in Western strategic thought to over-classify. Every novel
form of war seems to give rise to a new classification. Conventional war,
which tends to be seen as the prototype of war, has been joined by unconventional
or irregular war, hybrid war and many smaller-scope categories
such as asymmetric warfare, grey-zone warfare, information warfare, cyber
warfare and ambiguous warfare.4
Two weaknesses are inherent in this proliferation
of new conceptions of war and warfare. Firstly, the emphasis on
form is unhelpful, not least because current Western understanding is often
fatalistic about the present and future character of war, as if the West were
a passive actor that can only accept and try to adapt to whatever version
of warfare the enemy conjures. This disposition ignores the fact that wars
take shape as a result of the interaction of adversaries.5
If the West consistently
finds itself stymied by the character of any particular war, it is simply
not practising strategy well enough to control the interaction and succeed.
Secondly, the ad hoc introduction of new concepts can ill serve strategic
theory itself by blithely overriding it.6
The concept of hybrid warfare incorporates a number of diverse, and
to some extent logically unrelated, elements of both war and peacetime
competition into a single concept, thus blurring the line between the two situations.
In its original conception, proposed by Frank Hoffman in 2007, the
term referred primarily to the domain of war.7
Generalising from an analysis
of Hizbullah’s approach in its 2006 war against Israel, Hoffman maintained
that ‘hybrid wars incorporate a range of different modes of warfare, including
conventional capabilities, irregular tactics and formations, terrorist acts
including indiscriminate violence and coercion, and criminal disorder’. He
expected future adversaries to use a mixture of conventional and irregular
means that were ‘operationally and tactically directed and coordinated
within the main battlespace to achieve synergistic effects’.8
As the concept was more widely adopted, the relatively tight focus on
battlefield integration was increasingly ignored, such that most scholars
War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction | 103
today understand hybrid warfare to be simply the mixture of conventional
and irregular means used by an actor in its overall war effort. Murat
Caliskan has described the concept as the rediscovery of grand strategy.9
The primary stimulus for this mutation of the hybrid-warfare concept is
Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent instigation of civil
war in eastern Ukraine. Some commentators consider both campaigns to be
of the same nature, representative of Russia’s new way of war, but only one
of them actually turned into a war. Yet the term hybrid warfare is applied to
both campaigns to capture non-violent as well as violent means, spanning
both times of peace (but not friendly cooperation) and war.
This redefinition paved the way for a further mutation of the concept:
after 2014, hybrid warfare increasingly turned into Russian hybrid warfare,
tightly connecting the term and the particular case. The term is now commonly
applied to Russian foreign policy in general.10
Russia’s use of
disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks increasingly shifted the focus
of scholars investigating hybrid warfare to these non-military means, sidelining
the crucial role that the Russian threat of and actual use of force played
in both Crimea and Donbas.11
As part of this discursive shift, the object of the
hybrid-warfare concept changed: while Russia has been engaged in actual
war in Ukraine, some Western commentators interpret this war simply as
an element of hybrid war directed against the West. While Russia’s actions
might indeed be intended as a hostile signal to the West, to suggest that
Russia is engaged in war against the West ‘is a dangerous misuse of the
word “war”’.12
In fact, it is mainly Russia’s non-military campaigns that
have extended to countries beyond Ukraine. Thus, over the years, hybrid
warfare has changed from an operational concept to, as Ofer Fridman puts
it, a ‘catch-all description for the new Russian threat to European security’.13
More recent interpretations of the term imply an overlapping of war
and peace in which non-military action by itself is interpreted as an act of
war. In a world of hybrid wars, there is less and less space for a concept
of peace. And if hybrid warfare is understood to be simply the mixture of
conventional and unconventional means in war, it would be difficult to find
a war that was not hybrid. In its broadest definition – referring to Russia’s
disinformation campaigns in the West, with no threat or use of force – the
104 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
term completely redefines both war and peace: it suggests that war can exist
not only with no use of force, but even with no threat of it. The concept
thus erodes the traditional analytical separation between war and peace that
turns on the distinction between mass military violence and non-military
forms of power without providing a clear alternative delineation. It lumps
together elements found in both situations into a single category, highlighting
means while ignoring context or aims. For these reasons, the concept of
hybrid war limits our ability to understand the dynamics of conflict.
The related idea of grey-zone challenges blurs the distinction between
peace and war by creating an undefined middle ground ‘that is neither
fully war nor fully peace’, ‘a landscape churning with political, economic,
and security competitions that require constant attention’ or competition
‘primarily below the threshold of armed conflict’.14
The concept is usually
employed to analyse recent Russian and Chinese actions, or the behaviour
of revisionist states more generally.15
Ambiguity is central to this approach:
David Barno and Nora Bensahel argue that grey-zone conflicts ‘involve some
aggression or use of force, but in many ways their defining characteristic is
ambiguity – about the ultimate objectives, the participants, whether international
treaties and norms have been violated, and the role that military
forces should play in response’.16
As with hybrid warfare, the assumption is
that while it does not quite look like war, it certainly cannot be peace either.
The concept itself may create more ambiguity than the phenomenon it
aims to describe. As with the hybrid-warfare concept, its promoters remain
vague about how it can actually be differentiated from war and peace, or
how the two concepts should be redefined to make room for an in-between
category. If the grey zone is merely defined as competition, the difference
between it and the regular conduct of international politics is unclear.
Moreover, definitions of the concept seem mainly to stem from flawed perceptions
of war and peace rather than changes in reality: Hal Brands says
grey-zone activity is ‘deliberately designed to remain below the threshold
of conventional military conflict and open interstate war’, Michael Mazarr
that it moves ‘gradually toward its objectives rather than seeking conclusive
results in a specific period of time’.17
Conflict in the grey zone is thus contrasted
not with the Clausewitzian characterisation of war, but with an ideal
War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction | 105
version of war as conventional war – battles between state militaries – that
has dominated Western strategic thought for decades.18
Formulations of the
grey-zone concept also rely on a positive notion of peace, defined as ‘the
integration of human society’.19
In strategic studies, however, the understanding
of war has usually relied on a negative notion of peace, namely
‘the absence of violence’.20
Thus, promoters of the grey-zone idea have opened conceptual space
that they are unable to fill. By claiming that grey-zone challenges are neither
fully peace nor fully war, they redefine those concepts without clarifying
how they are to be understood. One response is that because reality is
murky and ambiguous, the concepts used to capture it must be too. But
concepts can never fully capture reality. The question is whether these particular
ones are more helpful in guiding analysis and action than traditional
concepts of war and peace.
Resettling war
As the idea of conventional war has come to dominate our understanding
of war in general, even good Clausewitzians sometimes struggle with the
concept of war. Hew Strachan notes that it ‘involves the use of force’, but
acknowledges that a ‘state of war can exist between opponents without
there being any active fighting’. He identifies contention as a key element
of war and suggests that ‘war assumes a degree of intensity and duration
to the fighting’, although this runs counter to his earlier observation that
states of war may exist without fighting. He proposes that those involved
in waging war do so in a public rather than a private capacity, but feels
stymied by the phenomenon of mercenaries participating in war. Finally, he
recognises that war always has a political aim, but acknowledges that often
wars are waged beyond political sense.21
Strachan’s critical elements of war
stem from Clausewitzian considerations, but are mixed with other elements.
Clausewitz’s foundational definition of war is ‘an act of force to compel our
enemy to do our will’.22
This has encouraged others to focus exclusively on the
use of violence. The level of violence, for instance, is the defining factor in
the Correlates of War dataset project, which sets the baseline for war as the
occurrence of 1,000 battle deaths in a year.23
106 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
By focusing almost exclusively on violence, Western thinking on war
misses the nuance of Clausewitz’s definition, which specifies not only (1)
violence (an act of force) but also (2) the imposition of will (3) by an adversary
for war to arise. Unless all three criteria are satisfied, the phenomenon
in question is not war, even if it breaks peace. Accordingly, peace and war
are not strict opposites; mass violence can take different forms, of which war
is only one.
Underlying Clausewitz’s three criteria is an appreciation of political and
strategic agency and intent. He also famously stated that ‘war is simply a
continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means’.24
A mutual acknowledgement emerges that violence
has become the primary means of achieving political
goals. Mutual recourse to violence reflects shared
recognition of the inadequacy of regular non-violent
political means to achieve desired outcomes. This state
of affairs is likely to change over time, in response to
strategic successes or failures; indeed, the very point of
strategy is to force the enemy to change its mind.25
But it reflects the particular
intentions and agency of parties involved in a war at its outset.
Forms of war are a conceptual dead end because intentions may endure
even as forms change. Intensity of warfare lacks definitional relevance
because, even though new conditions set in, reciprocal political and strategic
intentions, which give instrumental primacy to military force over all other
political means, endure. Thomas Hobbes understood this in discussing war
in his Leviathan: ‘the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in
the known disposition thereto’.26
Jan Almäng, writing about the vagueness of
war, emphasised the strategic actors’ representations of their mutual interaction
by citing the phony war between the Allies and Germany in late 1939
and early 1940 as an example of a situation in which war existed although
warfare hardly occurred.27
Yet what is representation, if not a direct enunciation
of agency and intention? The phony war is considered war because
the adversarial intentions of the Allies on one side and Germany on the
other elevated military force to instrumental primacy. The lack of intense
fighting during the phony war does not change the basic mutual recognition
Peace and war
are not strict
opposites
War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction | 107
of the importance of violence to gain the desired political goals at that time.
During the interregnum in which warfare did not arise, it was just because
no side was ready to act on its intentions until campaigning season began.
Maintaining the instrumental primacy of military force reflects a political
decision and underlying attitude. During the Cold War, after Michael
Howard and Peter Paret’s 1976 translation of On War increased Clausewitz’s
popularity and currency, the liberal West interpreted his characterisation
of war as politics by other means predominantly as a normative statement
about civil–military relations and war’s instrumental nature, firmly subordinated
to policy direction. This raises the question of whether the Cold War
would fit the Clausewitzian definition of war. It would not. Despite intense
and extensive concern about nuclear weapons and strategy, neither side
ever seriously intended to settle the rivalry directly with nuclear (or conventional)
weapons unless the other side crossed certain very fundamental red
lines. Instead, they relied on deterrence. But deterrence is not war, because
the intention to use force is conditional for the former but not the latter.
As Strachan notes, ‘today we too often use [Clausewitz’s] normative statement
about war’s relationship to policy as though it applied to the causes
of war, and so fail to recognize how often states go to war not to continue
policy but to change it. The declaration of war, and more immediately the
use of violence, alters everything.’28
Strachan thus suggests that Clausewitz
focused on the relationship between policy and the conduct of war, rather
than the causes of war. Even this eminently reasonable interpretation may
be reading too much into Clausewitz’s words. Like strategy, politics is fundamentally
concerned with shaping the future, albeit a much broader future
than that with which strategy is concerned. Intentions therefore underlie
policy, and are hostile when they involve harming the opposite party for
whatever political purpose. Hostile intention must exist in a political relationship
between future belligerents before manifesting itself as violence in
war; otherwise, recourse to war would be unnecessary. The failure to appreciate
that hostile intentions are part of politics but not yet necessarily war
has given rise to the concepts hybrid warfare and the grey zone.
Clausewitzian definitions provide a simple and clear-cut categorisation
of war and peace that is useful for making policy. Naturally, aggressors do
108 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
conduct attacks cognisant of the possibility of resistance. But unless violence
is reciprocated, there is no state of war. If there is reciprocal violence and
an intention to continue relying on it to achieve political goals, then war
exists. If not, it doesn’t. Only if one of the political agents involved has not
yet made up its mind about whether to resort to force does the distinction
become blurry. Thus, war begins in earnest with defence. Attack alone is
not sufficient, as the Germans demonstrated with their invasion of Austria
in 1938; the Soviets with their invasions of the Baltic states in 1939–40,
Hungary (which resisted to a degree) in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968;
and the Russians with their invasion of Crimea in 2014.
*	*	*
The claim that concepts such as hybrid warfare or the grey zone better
reflect the real world, and therefore provide a stronger basis for policy and
strategy in practice than the old distinction between war and peace, does
not easily survive scrutiny.
The concepts emerged from Russia’s conduct in Ukraine and China’s in
the South China Sea. Impressed with their apparent success, Western commentators
have argued that the Western reaction should mirror the threat
– that is, that it should take hybrid form or be conducted in the grey zone.29
This way of thinking presages a tit-for-tat approach: the Chinese build
islands, the United States and its partners sail through the South China Sea
on freedom-of-navigation voyages; the Russians disseminate fake news,
NATO allies try to refute it. Such responses are inherently reactive, and
merely delay a full reckoning with China’s and Russia’s intentions to shape
their respective strategic environments. The attractiveness of the tit-for-tat
approach lies in its capacity to prevent escalation to outright war: if the West
assumes its opponents operate by the rules they themselves have established,
their actions too will remain hybrid or in the grey zone.
Yet there is a risk here of a kind of mirror-imaging. If the Russians or
Chinese do not view Western activity through the hybrid or grey-zone
lens, they may construe Western responses as escalation towards war and
react accordingly. And in fact, the concepts of hybrid warfare and the grey
War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction | 109
zone are products of a broadly Western, and especially American, strategic
culture. The Russians do not think about hybrid war in the same way that
the West does. Their term for it is a direct transliteration of the Western term
and is only used in referring to the Western concept.30
Indeed, the West’s
hybrid and grey-zone concepts bolster Russian narratives about insidious
Western aggression insofar as they can be used to characterise Western
support for pro-democratic revolutions in Russia’s sphere of influence and
in the Middle East, as well as Russian actions in Ukraine.
The crucial difference between the new concepts and the old war–peace
distinction lies in political awareness and determination. If everything is conceived
in diluted hybrid or grey terms, then the political costs of inadequate
action are presumptively low, and a given political leader can afford to kick
the can down the road. Challenges cast as hybrid or grey-zone can also be
treated as non-strategic and handled in a merely technocratic manner. This
has been a flaw of modern strategic thinking since the early Cold War: concerns
about surprise attack and accidental war ignored longer-term historical
factors in political relations in favour of technical issues which could presumably
be solved without mobilising the political will that would be required
to support a fighting war.31
By contrast, the Clausewitzian war–peace distinction
is premised on the importance of understanding what geopolitical
outcome an opponent is attempting to achieve and what it would mean. That
knowledge can facilitate an honest, thorough and clear strategic assessment
of whether a country should seek peace or prepare for war.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Joe Maiolo and Jeff Michaels for comments on an earlier draft of
this article.
Notes
1	 See, for example, Geraint Hughes, ‘War
in the Grey Zone: Historical Reflections
and Contemporary Implications’,
Survival, vol. 62, no. 3, June–July 2020,
p. 133; and Michael C. McCarthy,
Matthew A. Moyer and Brett H.
Venable, Deterring Russia in the Gray
Zone (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies
Institute, US Army War College,
2019), p. 9, https://publications.
110 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
armywarcollege.edu/pubs/3687.pdf.
2	 See Colin S. Gray, Categorical
Confusion? The Strategic Implications
of Recognizing Challenges Either as
Irregular or Traditional (Carlisle, PA:
Strategic Studies Institute, US Army
War College, 2012), p. vii, https://
publications.armywarcollege.edu/
pubs/2171.pdf.
3	 See Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos:
Revolutions in Military Affairs and
the Evidence of History (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2002), p. 17; and Jeffrey
H. Michaels, The Discourse Trap and
the US Military: From the War on
Terror to the Surge (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
4	 See, for example, Frank G. Hoffman,
Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of
Hybrid Wars (Washington DC: Potomac
Institute, 2007); McCarthy, Moyer and
Venable, Deterring Russia in the Gray
Zone; and Lyle J. Morris et al., Gaining
Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone:
Response Options for Coercive Aggression
Below the Threshold of Major War (Santa
Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019).
5	 See Lukas Milevski, ‘The Nature of
Strategy versus the Character of War’,
Comparative Strategy, vol. 35, no. 5,
December 2016, pp. 438–46.
6	 See John Gerring, ‘What Makes a
Concept Good? A Criterial Framework
for Understanding Concept Formation
in the Social Sciences’, Polity, vol.
31, no. 3, 1999, pp. 357–93, 382; and
Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside,
‘Blurred Lines: Gray-zone Conflict
and Hybrid War – Two Failures of
American Strategic Thinking’, Naval
War College Review, vol. 73, no. 1,
Winter 2020, pp. 12–48.
7	 Hoffman, while not the first, was the
most influential definer of ‘hybrid
warfare’. See Hoffman, Conflict in the
21st Century.
8	 Ibid., p. 29.
9	 Murat Caliskan, ‘Hybrid Warfare
Through the Lens of Strategic Theory’,
Defense & Security Analysis, vol. 35, no.
1, January 2019, pp. 40–58.
10	 See Bettina Renz, ‘Russia and Hybrid
Warfare’, Contemporary Politics, vol. 22,
no. 3, June 2016, p. 293.
11	 See Ofer Fridman, Russian Hybrid
Warfare: Resurgence and Politicization
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2018), p. 115.
12	 Ibid., p. 52.
13	 See Samuel Charap, ‘The Ghost of
Hybrid War’, Survival, vol. 57, no. 6,
December 2015–January 2016, p. 51.
14	 Quoting, respectively, US Department
of Defense, ‘Quadrennial Defense
Review’, February 2010, p. 73, https://
archive.defense.gov/qdr/QDR%20
as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdf;
Nadia Schadlow, ‘Peace and War: The
Space Between’, War on the Rocks, 18
August 2014, https://warontherocks.
com/2014/08/peace-and-war-thespace-between/;
and Morris et al.,
Gaining Competitive Advantage in the
Gray Zone, p. iii.
15	 See, for example, Hal Brands,
‘Paradoxes of the Gray Zone’, E-Note,
Foreign Policy Research Institute, 5
February 2016, https://www.fpri.org/
article/2016/02/paradoxes-gray-zone/;
Michael J. Mazarr, Mastering the Gray
Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of
Conflict (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies
Institute, US Army War College, 2015),
https://publications.armywarcollege.
edu/pubs/2372.pdf; Schadlow, ‘Peace
and War’; and James J. Wirtz, ‘Life in
War and Peace: Reaffirming the Distinction | 111
the “Gray Zone”: Observations for
Contemporary Strategists’, Defense &
Security Analysis, vol. 33, no. 2, April
2017, pp. 106–14.
16	 David Barno and Nora Bensahel,
‘Fighting and Winning in the
“Gray Zone”’, War on the Rocks, 19
May 2015, https://warontherocks.
com/2015/05/fighting-and-winning-
in-the-gray-zone/.
17	 Quoting, respectively, Brands,
‘Paradoxes of the Gray Zone’, p. 1; and
Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone, p. 58.
18	 See, for example, Hughes, ‘War in the
Grey Zone’, p. 133.
19	 Johan Galtung, ‘An Editorial’, Journal
of Peace Research, vol. 1, no. 1, March
1964, p. 2.
20	 Ibid.
21	 Hew Strachan, ‘Introductory Essay:
The Changing Character of War’, in
Karl Erik Haug and Ole Jørgen Maaø
(eds), Conceptualising Modern War
(London: Hurst & Co., 2011), pp. 8–9.
22	 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated
and edited by Michael Howard
and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1984), p.
75 (emphasis in original).
23	 See Meredith Reid Sarkees, ‘The
COW Typology of War: Defining and
Categorizing Wars (Version 4 of the
Data)’, Correlates of War Project, p. 1,
https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/
COW-war/the-cow-typology-of-war-
defining-and-categorizing-wars/@@
download/file/COW%20Website%20
-%20Typology%20of%20war.pdf.
24	 Clausewitz, On War, p. 605.
25	 Lukas Milevski, ‘Choosing Strategy:
Meaning, Significance, Context’,
Infinity Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, Summer
2018, pp. 15–18.
26	 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 84
(emphasis added).
27	 Jan Almäng, ‘War, Vagueness and
Hybrid War’, Defence Studies, vol. 19,
no. 2, April 2019, p. 195.
28	 Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy in the
Twenty-First Century’, in Hew
Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds),
The Changing Character of War (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 508.
29	 See, for example, Kathleen H.
Hicks et al., ‘By Other Means, Part
I: Campaigning in the Gray Zone’,
Report of the CSIS International
Security Program, July 2019, https://
csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.
com/s3fs-public/publication/
Hicks_GrayZone_interior_v4_FULL_
WEB_0.pdf.
30	 See Fridman, Russian Hybrid Warfare.
31	 See Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles:
Intellectuals and War from Kennan to
Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006), p. 58.
112 | Chiara Libiseller and Lukas Milevski
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