Not just war by other means: Cross‐border engagement as political struggle

Counterinsurgency: The US sends troops to Libya to fight an insurgent group. The insurgents claim the US launched an attack that failed to properly safeguard against civilian deaths. They make this claim publicly, hoping global public opinion will turn against the US and lead it to curtail its attacks, preventing further civilian (and non-civilian) deaths. Activists and media outlets pick up the story and report it around the world. I call cases like this—cross-border political engagements including both kinetic and non-kinetic elements—hybrid cases.1 It is not obvious how to understand the non-kinetic elements of hybrid cases. Should we understand them as warfare—conflicts between “enemies” locked in a “radically adversarial relationship” whose main task is to harm each other and whose main normative quandary is how much and what kind of harm they are permitted to inflict (see Walzer, 2017, p. xiii)? Or should we understand them as some (other) kind of political struggle? The question of which analytic frame to adopt is important, as, I will argue, there are serious democratic costs associated with understanding the non-kinetic elements of hybrid cases as warfare. In Counterinsurgency, understanding civilian casualty reports made by journalists, activists, and insurgents as acts of war would mean seeing them as acts meant to cause harm (by debilitating “enemy” forces) and as strategic communications whose purpose and value were, at best, unconnected to their truth. It would mean seeing their authors as potentially liable to attack—as Gross does when he describes journalists as “the foot soldiers of media warfare” (2015, p. 300) and argues they are therefore liable to harms including “capture, incarceration, expulsion, or the destruction or confiscation of their equipment” (2015, p. 269). And it would mean seeing their audiences as pawns to be manipulated by propagandists. Understanding civilian casualty reports instead as part of a political struggle would mean seeing them as statements that could inform, inspire critical reflection, and form the basis of democratic deliberation and contestation—which might not be contained within the borders of a single state. It would mean seeing their authors as sources of potentially weighty claims deserving real consideration and seeing their audiences as interlocutors capable of judging and responding in good faith to those claims. Existing scholarship does not often explicitly recognize the question of whether to understand the non-kinetic elements of hybrid cases as warfare or political struggle—let alone explicitly evaluate the costs and benefits of making one choice or another.2 Nonetheless, some (e.g., Blank, 2017; Gross, 2015; Gross Kittrie, 2016; Walzer, 2017) tend to treat them more like warfare, and others (e.g., Jurkevics, 2019; Miller, 2010, pp. 247–57; Miller, 2018; Valdez, 2019a, 2019b) tend to treat them more like political struggle. Here, I make explicit the implicit assumptions behind these two approaches, argue that adopting the war paradigm (understanding the non-kinetic elements of hybrid cases as “warfare”) has significant democratic costs, and argue that adopting an alternate political struggle paradigm could mitigate these costs. More specifically, overreliance on the war paradigm undermines the potential for cross-border politics to become—and be recognized as—a site of genuinely democratic politics. It does so in three ways. First, it presents global political as in adversarial relationship” 2017, p. to and each the that they might of to and the of that democratic politics. adopting the war paradigm the that in cross-border politics in the of their war to potentially democratic deliberation or political struggle. 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