28 March 2015

Hybrid War (or hypercompetition….)


A while ago – I lose track of when – I wrote about something on KoW which I’d clumsily called hypercompetition. I don’t claim anything particularly original about the notion, but I heard it blaring out of my radio last week under the guise of something now called hybrid war. 

The problem of the conspiracy theory accusations or difficulties with hypercompetition seem to have been politically overcome with the perception of threat provided by Russia in Ukraine. Prior to this a notion that Russian funding of things of influence might be problematic was bracketed under the heading of ‘conspiracy theory’. Money likes to travel.. and in this globalised world money is colour blind.. let it come from wherever it comes. That sort of thing. And it’s not to pick on the Russian money, certainly not in the way I think about this hybridity or hypercompetition. It strikes me that there is rather a large number of states and significant networks of influence leveraging influence.

There are several underpinning follow-on questions:


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