Into the Grey: Grey Zone Warfare in Past, Present, and Future

“灰色地带战争”成为2014年全球战略挑战的关键。俄罗斯在乌克兰的行动并不是任何公开或容易识别的战争形式的一部分，这让学者、专家、政客和西方武装部队感到困惑。这场冲突和其他在战争与和平之间的“灰色地带”的冲突被描述为一系列“原始概念”：“新战争”，低强度冲突，战争以外的行动，第四代战争，混合战争，以及实际上，“灰色地带战争”，其一个共同点是战争已经改变。“现代战争”的时代已经一去不复返了，在现代战争中，穿制服的人进行激烈的战斗以取得决定性的胜利。取代它们的是“后现代”的流动性和扩散性，战争与和平之间传统区别的侵蚀，“心灵和思想”的长期斗争，几乎无限的暴力范围，以及从代理民兵到网络战争的大型工具箱，其广泛的目标是破坏对手的稳定。这一概念的基础是，历史上充斥着与“乌克兰”--或者实际上是“阿富汗”--有更多共同点的冲突，而不是与19世纪和20世纪常规战争（即欧洲战争）的假定规范。我们的网络通过假设灰色地带战争是最合适的分析术语来捕捉连接“后现代”和欧洲中心主义19世纪和20世纪规范之外的其他形式的冲突的关键因素：存在于宣布国家间战争与和平的国家之间的有组织暴力。全球性的、长期的历史研究方法使我们能够在分析灰色地带战争时纳入各种各样的案例，从中世纪的欧洲围城战到世纪的中日朝鲜战争，然而，灰色地带战争本质上是一个有争议的概念，缺乏明确定义的参数。因此，我们的目标是通过研究各种形式的战争，不适合欧洲规范的国家为基础的冲突，并创建一个类型学的“灰色地带战争”提供概念上的清晰度。在借鉴具有代表性的历史案例研究中，我们将确定其潜在维度，创建和讨论分类类别，测量和排序它们，绘制变化，并最终提供重要的概念构建块。该项目的范围是全球性的，具有合作性质，将创建一个来自各种学科的学者网络-从历史到IR到安全研究-进行合作，比较和对比不同的案例，以便共同创建灰色地带战争的类型学。然后，将对照当前相关军事战略和理论，对结果进行分析和评估，以便对基于相关历史实例的战略和理论提出批评和/或补充。这将为目前灰色地带战争的学术方法、军事院校的课程、理论手册、战术、作战和战略层面的政策增加重要的新想法和数据，并增加公众对灰色地带现象复杂性的理解。为了实现这些目标，我们将组织两次研讨会、一次圆桌会议和一次简报会。第一个讲习班的重点是在历史案例研究的基础上发展灰色地带战争的类型学。在第二次研讨会期间，学者和从业人员将共同测试历史上知情的类型对当代案例研究。在圆桌会议期间，我们将测试和推广灰色地带战争类型学和案例研究对当前和未来军事战略，理论和行动的适用性，以及更广泛的外交和国防政策。最后，我们将组织一次在线简报会，面向广大记者、非政府组织代表和其他有关各方，介绍我们的调查结果，并讨论其相关性和影响。

'Grey zone warfare' emerged as a key strategic global challenges in 2014. Russian operations in Ukraine, which were not part of any declared or easily recognisable form of warfare, confounded academics, pundits, politicians and Western armed forces. This and other conflicts in the 'grey zone' somewhere between war and peace were then described by a host of 'proto-concepts': 'new wars', low-intensity conflicts, operations other than war, fourth-generation warfare, hybrid warfare, and, indeed, 'grey zone warfare', whose one common denominator was that warfare had changed. Gone were the days of 'modern warfare', the domain of uniformed men fighting pitched battles to achieve decisive victories. Replacing them was 'post-modern' fluidity and diffusion, an erosion of traditional distinctions between war and peace, protracted struggles for 'hearts and minds', an almost limitless spectrum of violence, and a large toolbox ranging from proxy militias to cyber warfare with the wide-ranging objective of destabilising adversaries.This project, however, is founded on the notion that history is rife with conflicts that have more in common with 'Ukraine' - or, indeed, 'Afghanistan' - than with the supposed norm of 19th and 20th-century regular, i.e. European, warfare. Our network innovates by positing that grey zone warfare is the most suitable analytical term to capture the key element connecting both 'post-modern' and other forms of conflict outside the Eurocentric 19th and 20th-century norm: organised violence existing between the states of declared interstate war and peace. A global, longue durée historical approach allows us to include in our analyses of grey zone warfare a diverse range of cases, ranging from sieges in medieval Europe to the Sino-Japanese proxy war over Korea in the 19th century.Yet, grey zone warfare is an essentially contested concept, lacking clearly defined parameters. We thus aim to provide conceptual clarity by studying various forms of warfare that do not fit the European norm of state-based conflict, and to create a typology of 'grey zone warfare'. In drawing on representative historical case studies, we will identify their underlying dimensions, create and discuss categories for classification, measure and sort them, map variations, and, ultimately, provide important conceptual building blocs.Global in scope and collaborative in nature, this project will create a network of scholars from a variety of disciplines - ranging from History to IR to Security Studies - to collaborate, compare and contrast different cases in order to jointly create a typology of grey zone warfare. The results will then be analysed and assessed in comparison to current relevant military strategies and doctrines, with the aim of critiquing and/or adding to those based on relevant historical examples. This will add important new ideas and data to both current scholarly approaches to grey zone warfare, the curricula of military academies, doctrinal manuals, policy on both the tactical, operational and strategic levels, and increase public understanding of the complexities of the grey zone phenomenon.In order to accomplish these aims, we will organise two workshops, a round-table and a briefing session. The first workshop focuses on developing a typology of grey zone warfare on the basis of historical case studies. During the second workshop academics and practitioners will together test the historically informed typology against contemporary case studies. During the round-table we will test and promote the applicability of the typology of grey zone warfare and case studies for current and future military strategies, doctrines, and operations, as well as foreign and defence policy more generally. Finally, we will organise an online briefing session, aimed at a wide audience of journalists, NGO representatives, and other interested parties, to present our findings and discuss their relevance and implications.