ABSTRACT This article advances hybrid terrorism as a policy‐relevant analytical frame for understanding emerging threats to critical infrastructure under conditions of ambiguity and deniability. It argues that existing frameworks such as hybrid threats, hybrid warfare or state terrorism struggle to capture forms of coercion that deliberately target infrastructure through state‐enabled, plausibly deniable proxy activity operating below conventional thresholds of attribution and response. These gaps are particularly consequential in regions characterised by limited redundancy and high societal dependence on infrastructure, such as the High North. Drawing on a closed, cross‐sector workshop, the article synthesises practitioner insights through rapid thematic analysis. The findings cluster around three interrelated dimensions. Conceptually, participants highlighted persistent uncertainty and frustration with existing terminology when confronted with incidents combining cyber intrusion, physical sabotage and insider facilitation. Operationally, they identified recurring vulnerability classes, including tightly coupled physical–digital systems, insider access, supply‐chain exposure and low redundancy, alongside likely attack patterns characterised by dispersed disruption, difficult detection and resource exhaustion. At the governance level, participants emphasised how plausible deniability complicates attribution, coordination, public communication and accountability, exposing institutional seams that undermine effective infrastructure protection. The article argues that, while legally inexact, the hybrid terrorism frame helps link these dynamics and sharpen the diagnosis of infrastructure‐targeted coercion. While grounded in the Arctic context, the insights developed here hold relevance far beyond the High North, offering a transferable orientation for anticipating and mitigating deniable forms of coercion wherever societies depend on complex, interdependent infrastructures.
Bartoszewicz et al. (Sun,) studied this question.