Hybrid Warfare and Political Crisis Communication

Abstract

In the realm of post-pandemics, “the new normal”, fake news, post-truths, hybrid and conventional wars, political crisis communication naturally reappears as one of the key processes of emerging political disasters around the world. In particular, the characteristics and dynamics of hybrid warfare lend tangible weight to otherwise highly abstract and worn-out biopolitical notions of power, discipline, and control. I argue that post-Foucauldian biopolitical theory and crisis communication studies can be mutually inclusive, and the key premise for their incorporation is a concept of trust. Perhaps ironically, trust is an indeterminate but necessary mediator behind any exercise of power, discipline and control within or over the public, and any long-term political achievement or goal depends on trust performance throughout the political system. In other words, my goal relies on a compelling infiltration of Niklas Luhmann’s social theory of trust and power into contemporary biopolitics and crisis communication analysis by implementing the very performativity of a hybrid warfare itself. In this case, the conceptualization of hybrid warfare reinvents and sets in motion the Mertonian notion of self-fulfilling prophecy: trust, by being a parameter of a social system’s capacity to function in an expected way, forces heterogeneous cooperation of subsystems and individuals, but since the outcomes of cooperation are highly unpredictable (especially in crises), expectations can also be shifted, modified or abandoned, thus creating new sets of goals or coordinated actions. Trust fulfils any promise to the extent that it is being generated through social interactions: hence its performativity, i.e. the active formation, or enforcement of an ongoing reality, which routinely discredits the idea of a correct definition of the objective situation as irrelevant and obsolete. Consequently, political crisis communication better serves its purpose if equipped with a more adequate understanding of hybrid warfare “logic”, which specifically targets networks of trust.