Keeping the Greyzone: How Strategizing Preserves Liminality Between War and Peace

Greyzones between war and peace arise when antagonists pursue their (geo)political interests through actions that fall below the threshold of traditional warfare, such as insurgency, cyberattacks, propaganda, and covert military operations. We analyzed qualitative data to explore how organizational actors responded to a greyzone that ended 200 years of peace in Sweden. Contrary to expectations, they did so without mobilizing an existing unit in the government office designed to strategically manage crises. Instead, organizations and individuals seemingly ignored bureaucracy quite easily and shared sensitive national security information when acknowledging the greyzone’s emergence, counteracting its escalation, and steadying its presence. Most surprising was the role played by not current but former employees, which required the sharing of secrets. Because greyzones blur boundaries between peace and war, we conceptualize them as liminal spaces for examining strategic activities. We model the process and theorize on managing and maintaining new greyzones, proposing a liminal strategizing perspective that redirects strategic management research on liminality and extreme contexts.