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

Abstract

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 & Meisels, 2017a; 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 actors as enemies enmeshed in “a radically adversarial relationship” (Walzer, 2017, p. xiii), dedicated to harming and vanquishing each other. This obscures the possibility that they might develop relationships of reciprocal respect conducive to mutual learning and solidaristic collaboration across borders—precisely the kinds of relationships that best enable democratic politics. Second, adopting the war paradigm encourages the assumption that participants in cross-border politics act only in the service of their war strategy—rather than to advance potentially democratic deliberation or political struggle. The prevalence of this assumption can, in turn, transform the institutions through which people participate in cross-border politics (e.g., the media)—changing them from potential catalysts for democratic politics into vehicles through which belligerents carry out their war efforts. Third, if people believe participants in cross-border politics act only to further a war strategy, they may prematurely discount participants’ legitimate moral arguments, assuming these arguments are advanced purely instrumentally.

Whereas adopting the war paradigm risks incurring these democratic costs, I argue we could mitigate them by adopting the political struggle paradigm. This alternate paradigm casts participants in cross-border politics as participants in a shared political struggle who do not necessarily seek to harm or destroy their opponents, who may be open to revising their ends in response to pushback from opponents in ways combatants are not, and whose behavior should be governed primarily by principles of political responsibility (rather than, e.g., just war principles or principles of military strategy). Moreover, according to the political struggle paradigm, the border need not cleanly divide opponents from allies.³

Below, I more thoroughly define the war paradigm. I then argue that overreliance on it undermines the potential for cross-border politics to become (and be recognized as) a site of genuinely democratic politics in the three ways suggested above. Finally, I outline the alternative political struggle paradigm and argue that adopting it can mitigate the democratic costs associated with the war paradigm.

I do not claim that we should never use the war paradigm. Perhaps sometimes we should bear its democratic costs. Someone who sees little value in democratizing cross-border politics may judge the democratic costs of the war paradigm as morally insignificant. I will not attempt to defend democracy against its critics here. But understanding the democratic costs of adopting the war paradigm is a prerequisite for making any credible judgment about whether those costs are worth bearing—even a credible judgment that they are worth bearing. I enable this understanding here by illustrating the democratic costs of the war paradigm and how adopting an alternate paradigm could mitigate them. In revealing a new obstacle to the democratization of cross-border politics (overreliance on the war paradigm), my arguments may have added significance for proponents of transnational democracy (e.g., Benhabib, 2005, 2009; Bohman, 2007), but they remain important for anyone interested in honestly assessing the democratic costs and benefits of employing one or another analytic frame to understand cross-border politics.

The war paradigm is a particular way of conceptualizing and analyzing political activity. It is only plausible to use the war paradigm when such activity involves actors with opposing ends, so I will assume this is true in all the cases I discuss.

Employing the war paradigm to analyze political activity means treating participants as if they are enmeshed in “a radically adversarial relationship” (Walzer, 2017, p. xiii). Writing about conflicts that do not take the form of conventional kinetic warfare (“soft war”), Walzer illustrates how identifying these conflicts as “war” involves assuming this adversarial relationship as a central feature: “‘we’ are trying to harm enemies who are trying to harm ‘us.’ And in this kind of warfare, as in any other, the combatants need to know what harms are permissible and what harms aren't, who can be targeted and who must not be targeted” (Walzer, 2017, p. xiii). Walzer writes this in a forward to Gross and Meisels’ (2017a, p. 1) edited volume Soft War, which presents many modes of political engagement, including “all non-kinetic measures, whether persuasive or coercive, including cyber warfare and economic sanctions; media warfare and propaganda, nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, boycotts and ‘lawfare’” as forms of “war”—albeit of the “soft” variety. In fairness to Walzer, he does not argue that we should always understand these modes of engagement as “war,” but rather articulates (some of) the implications of doing so. He highlights some of the assumptions we make when we categorize an activity as “war.” That is, he articulates some of the implicit assumptions underlying the war paradigm, which I aim to make explicit here. Specifically, Walzer notes that in “war,” the main task of each actor is to harm those on opposing sides until they are defeated. The main normative question facing each actor is: How much and what kind of harm am I justified in causing my enemies (see Walzer, 2017, p. xiii)? This does not mean that radically adversarial relationships of this kind must be the only ones present in a political encounter for the war paradigm to be appropriate. Even enemies in war may share friendships, familial relationships, romantic relationships, and acts of mercy. But the choice to analyze their political activity using the war paradigm is a choice to treat their identities as enemies as their central identities, their task of harming their enemies to advance their own ends as their central task, and the normative question of how much and what kind of harm they should cause their enemies as their central normative quandary. The choice to analyze political activity using the war paradigm is a choice to treat political actors’ identities, tasks, and normative quandaries as defined by other (less radically adversarial) relationships as marginal. In other words, analyzing political activity using the war paradigm means analyzing it through an adversarial lens.

Employing the war paradigm also involves making certain assumptions about the principles that should govern political actors’ behavior, though the specific assumptions it entails vary depending on the role one occupies. For example, for political theorists, employing the war paradigm involves appealing to “just war” principles such as just cause (wars should only be waged for specified reasons), last resort (wars should only be waged after other options have been exhausted), discrimination (warring parties should attack only legitimate targets), necessity (every war campaign should be necessary to achieve a legitimate end), and proportionality (neither the war as a whole nor any individual act of war should cause too much damage compared to the benefits it promises).⁴ For legal analysts, adopting the war paradigm means assuming behavior should be governed primarily by the law of armed conflict (LOAC), which “governs the conduct of states, individuals, and non-state actors during armed conflict” and is largely based on just war principles (Blank, 2017, pp. 90–91). For military leaders, adopting the war paradigm means assuming behavior should be governed primarily by the principles of military strategy, which may also include or be constrained by just war principles.

Having clarified what the “war paradigm” is, I can now assess the costs of employing it to analyze the non-kinetic elements in hybrid cases of cross-border politics. In questioning whether we should use the war paradigm to analyze activities that are not literal warfare, I sympathize with advocates of jus ad vim, who argue we should not use just war theory to analyze the use of force-short-of-war (see Brunstetter, 2021; Brunstetter & Braun, 2013; for a review of the jus ad vim literature, see Galliott, 2019). However, jus ad vim theorists are still concerned with the use of force. Indeed, Brunstetter (2021, p. 8) explicitly limits his discussion to acts “that involve kinetic, lethal force.” Conversely, I focus on the non-kinetic elements of cross-border conflict. Thus, my analysis provides a necessary supplement to the jus ad vim literature—exposing another domain (non-kinetic engagement in the context of hybrid conflicts) in which overreliance on the war paradigm has significant disadvantages and, eventually, illustrating how adopting the alternate political struggle paradigm could mitigate them.

Given that reliance on the war paradigm to analyze cross-border politics can undermine the latter's democratic potential, I propose an alternate paradigm: the political struggle paradigm. By adopting the political struggle paradigm, we could mitigate the democratic costs associated with the war paradigm. While adopting the war paradigm involves analyzing cross-border politics through an adversarial lens that casts people on opposite sides of the border as enemies who must attempt to harm and defeat each other, adopting the political struggle paradigm involves using a co-participant lens that casts people on opposite sides of the border as co-participants in a political struggle. Some are opponents and some are allies, and the border does not necessarily cleanly divide opponents from allies. Moreover, although participants in a paradigmatic political struggle do seek political “victory,” they do not necessarily seek to harm or destroy their opponents as do warring combatants. And they may be open to revising their ends in response to criticism and pushback from their opponents in ways warring combatants are not.

The political struggle paradigm is ecumenical in that it can be adopted by deliberative/associationist and agonist democratic theorists alike.⁷ After all, associationists who emphasize the importance of deliberation aimed at establishing agreement need not deny that opposition can be a part of democratic politics. Indeed, initial disagreement is what makes necessary (and possible) the argumentative give-and-take that theorists like Christiano (2004, pp. 275–276), Blajer de la Garza (n.d., pp. 12–13), and Young (2000, pp. 3, 6) treat as a central feature of democracy. Similarly, agonists who see conflict and contestation as endemic to democrtic politics need not conceptualize this conflict as a form of war. Note Honig's description of her work in Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (“the book enacted the agonism of virtù, infiltrating and occupying its opponents”), which she directly contrasts with a more war-like approach (“and not (as in the agonism of Homer's epics) nobly destroying or defeating them”) (Maxwell et al., 2019, p. 662). And recall Mouffe's (2000, pp. 101–103) distinction between “antagonism” (in which one sees opponents as “enem[ies] to be destroyed” (2000, p. 102)) and her preferred model of democratic politics, “agonism” (in which one sees opponents as legitimate adversaries).

Another distinguishing feature of the political struggle paradigm is the principles it says should govern actors’ behavior. The war paradigm assumes actors’ behavior should be governed by just war principles, the LOAC, or military strategy. But adopting the political struggle paradigm means assuming actors’ behavior should be governed by principles of political responsibility—principles outlining individuals’ responsibilities for creating and supporting just institutions and social structures, and for contesting existing injustices. A principle telling us to support just institutions where they exist and help create them where they do not, in line with Rawls's natural duty of justice, would be one example (Rawls, 1999, p. 99). Young's (2006) principles requiring us to join with others (perhaps across the globe) in collective action to dismantle the unjust social structures we help perpetuate are another.

When we analyze cross-border politics using the political struggle paradigm, the central moral questions we face are not the ones we would face if we used the war paradigm. The war paradigm prompts us to ask, to paraphrase Walzer (2017, p. xiii): How much and what kind of harm should political actors do to their enemies on the other side of the border? Instead, the political struggle paradigm prompts us to ask: In what ways should political actors join with others in contestation aimed at achieving (what they believe to be) justice? Who (on either side of the border) should they seek out as allies, and who (on either side of the border) should they see as political opponents?

To illustrate what it would look like for theorists to analyze cross-border politics using the political struggle paradigm, we can turn to Valdez's (2019a, 2019b) examination of transnational political coalitions among opponents of racism in “Western” societies and opponents of colonial oppression outside the West. Miller's (2010, pp. 247–257) account of the “community of outlook” dedicated to what he calls “global social democracy” and who participate in social movements aimed at ending global injustice, inequality, domination, and exploitation is another excellent example. The same goes for Jurkevics’ (2019) account of people engaged in political contestation about and across the multiple, overlapping jurisdictions in which they are subject to political power.

The salient normative questions regarding actors involved in such political struggles include (for Valdez, 2019a, 2019b and Miller, 2010, esp. ch. 9) how they ought to cooperate with others to oppose the global injustice, domination, and exploitation brought about by imperial or neo-imperial powers and (for Jurkevics, 2019) how they should participate in and safeguard democratic decision-making processes even when this necessitates exercising and holding accountable political power that transcends national borders. In other words, participants’ central behavioral requirements are not determined by just war principles, the LOAC, or military strategy, but instead by principles indicating how they can and should join with others in political action to oppose injustice.

We can imagine how different Blank's analysis would look if she adopted this outlook instead of the war paradigm. Claims that an attack killed too many civilians and truthful media reporting on such claims would not appear as underhanded attempts to stop legitimate attacks, which must be treated with suspicion because they originate from or seem to serve the interests of “enemies” on the other side of a border. A global public who responded to these reports with anger or opposition to military activity would not be seen as unwitting dupes of a clever insurgency manipulating their emotional responses to turn them against the attacking military. And the media reporting on civilian casualties would not be compelled to become a full-fledged instrument of the attacking state's war effort, because it would not be seen as a tool of war that must be fully co-opted by one belligerent party to avoid its benefiting the “enemy.”

Thus, moving from the war paradigm to the political struggle paradigm can mitigate the democratic costs of the former. If those engaged in cross-border politics made this transition, they would no longer see each other as enemies who must be vanquished, but as fellow participants in political contestation who may turn out to be opponents or allies, and who may learn something from each other's insights. They would no longer see claims from people beyond their borders as strategically crafted communications designed to accomplish war aims. Instead, they would see these claims as potentially credible and worthy of serious consideration. Finally, if participants recognized institutions like the media as integral parts of democratic political struggle, rather than seeing them as tools of one or another belligerent party, they would be less likely to morph those institutions into pure weapons of war, decimating their democratic potential.

Du Bois's transnational activism against racism and empire (see Valdez, 2019b) illustrates what it could look like for participants in cross-border politics to adopt the political struggle paradigm and how this could enable their political activities to become genuinely democratic—even against a background of frequent violence. Du Bois's activism is only one among many examples. There are myriad other civil society actors throughout history who have arguably rejected the war paradigm in favor of the political struggle paradigm. Consider, for example, feminist activists in Vietnam, the United States, and Canada who collaborated in an international women's movement against the US war in Vietnam (Tzu-Chun Wu, 2013, pp. 193–218); the Ugandan pastor and Congolese refugees who co-founded Hope of Children and Women Victims of Violence in Uganda, which provides skills training programs to refugees and Ugandan citizens (Pincock et al., 2020, p. 1); or the global network of states and civil society actors that collaborated in recent decades to advocate for a nuclear weapons ban (Gibbons, 2018). I make no attempt to discuss the full universe of cases in this article alone. Rather, for the purposes of my argument, I need only discuss an illustrative case to show what cross-border politics can look like when participants reject the war paradigm in favor of the political struggle paradigm—and for this, I turn to Du Bois.

The activism I discuss below on the part of Du Bois was nonviolent, but we can interpret it as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle in which both imperialists and their opponents used kinetic and non-kinetic means. We are therefore justified in treating Du Bois's activism as a non-kinetic element of a hybrid case. Indeed, colonization and racial oppression in Du Bois's time were carried out by massive and long-term (kinetic) violence. If anti-imperialist, anti-racist activism in this context can take the form of democratic cross-border politics, surely there is hope that cross-border activism in other violent contexts might take a similar form. At the very least, Du Bois's example shows that democratic political engagement via non-kinetic means is possible, even when it is part of a conflict in which other actors use kinetic force.

Valdez (2019b, esp. chs. 3–5) describes how Du Bois cultivated a transnational network of activists to challenge imperialist racialized domination, which they saw as intertwined with domestic racial injustice. Excluded from or subordinated within domestic and international political institutions, Du Bois and his allies created new channels for their political activities through which they cultivated solidarity, respect, and constructive dialogue among themselves and harnessed these resources to politically oppose the empire. For example, Du Bois hosted the 1919 Pan-African Congress, bringing together African-Americans and Africans from several countries to discuss the future of people of color around the world and in an attempt to influence Western leaders’ contemporaneous peace talks at Versailles (Valdez, 2019b, pp. 1–2). Du Bois also attended transnational political events and cultivated connections and dialogue among opponents of racial oppression around the world—for instance, by covering salient world events and including contributions from international authors in his newspaper, The Crisis—and he drew on these connections to facilitate political action on behalf of colonized people and African-Americans (Valdez, 2019b, pp. 161–175).

Thus, Du Bois approached opposition to imperial oppression as a cross-border political struggle—seeking allyship with potential co-participants from around the world. Someone adopting the war paradigm might understand opposition to imperialism as an adversarial conflict between “colonizers” and “colonized,” assuming that membership in a colonizing or colonized country (or race) was sufficient to place a person in one or the other category. But Du Bois seems to have thought, in line with the political struggle paradigm, that allies could be found among “colonized” peoples and racial groups subordinated by imperialism and within “colonizing” peoples and racial groups privileged by imperialism. After all, he sought political connections with “white European peace activists and black intellectuals and activists from around the world” (Valdez, 2019b, p. 165).

Du Bois cultivated dialogue among his transnational allies and built on this dialogue to spur joint political action. Insofar as The Crisis was a locus of this activity, this case also illustrates how media outlets not beholden to the war paradigm can catalyze democratic politics. Indeed, we are justified in calling Du Bois's activism “democratic” (Valdez (2019b, p. 175) certainly presents it as such) in that it seems to have centrally involved dialogue, relationships of mutual respect, the good-faith evaluation of different actors’ claims and arguments, and an effort to elevate unjustly marginalized voices in political decision-making processes. Many if not all of these features would have been undermined had Du Bois and his allies understood their activities in terms of the war paradigm. This also illustrates how we can meaningfully describe cross-border politics as “democratic” even in the absence of formal transnational democratic institutions: that Du Bois and his allies did not constitute a transnational state-like apparatus with electoral and enforcement capability does not mean their movement was not “democratic.”

Similarly, Valdez's treatment of Du Bois illustrates how, when theorists transition from the war paradigm to the political struggle paradigm, they avoid inappropriately projecting war-like mentalities and behaviors onto participants in cross-border politics and thereby losing the opportunity to understand and encourage novel forms of cross-border democratic politics. Valdez (2019b, p. 175) explicitly presents DuBois's activity as a “political craft” that inaugurated a “transnational counter-public,” which she suggests we should see as a demos. Alternatively, adopting the war paradigm could have led Valdez to understand struggles over empire as (only) adversarial conflicts between “colonizers” and “colonized,” and in turn to overlook precisely the kind of political alliances and activities Du Bois inaugurated by transcending this binary “us vs. them” framing. Indeed, Valdez (2019a) criticizes contemporary global justice theorists for doing just this, though she does not connect this oversight to the adoption of the war paradigm.

In sum, adopting the political struggle paradigm to analyze cross-border politics encourages and renders intelligible relationships of reciprocal respect conducive to mutual learning and solidaristic collaboration across borders. It discourages the cooptation or transformation of institutions (e.g., the media) that could otherwise serve as catalysts for democratic politics into cogs in a war machine. It encourages participants to take others’ moral criticism seriously, rather than summarily dismissing it as a part of their “enemy's” war strategy. That is, adopting the political struggle paradigm paves the way for truly democratic cross-border politics. Granted, adopting the political struggle paradigm alone will not guarantee cross-border politics will suddenly become democratic. But whatever else is needed to foster democratic politics, understanding political activity through the political struggle paradigm, rather than the war paradigm, takes us one step in that direction.

As my analysis has shown, we can find examples of both the war paradigm and the political struggle paradigm in existing literature on cross-border political engagement. However, the scholars who employ these paradigms do not typically present themselves as having chosen one paradigm over the other—or even recognize the two paradigms as alternatives to each other. By drawing attention to the war paradigm and political struggle paradigm as opposed frames, my analysis facilitates a deeper understanding of the scholars who employ these paradigms (often without reflecting on their merits). My analysis may also encourage more conscientious reflection on the choice between the two paradigms, as people may make more deliberate choices about which frames to employ when presented with competing alternatives (Chong & Druckman, 2007, pp. 110–111).

I have also gone beyond existing scholarship by making explicit the often-implicit assumptions behind both the war paradigm and the political struggle paradigm. Often, scholars simply employ their chosen frame, adopting its corresponding assumptions. Those who adopt the war paradigm assume that actors on opposite sides of a border are enemies enmeshed in an adversarial relationship whose behavior should be governed by just war theory, the LOAC, or military strategy. Those who adopt the political struggle paradigm assume that actors are co-participants in a political struggle who may find opponents or allies on either side of the border and whose behavior should be governed by principles of political responsibility. But neither proponents of the war paradigm nor the political struggle paradigm do enough to acknowledge these assumptions or their connection to their chosen paradigms. Identifying the assumptions at the base of each paradigm is a prerequisite to making a conscientious choice between them.

My examination of the democratic costs of adopting the war paradigm further facilitates such conscientious choice. Perhaps these costs will sometimes be worth bearing. But to make informed judgments about whether they are, we must first have a thorough understanding of what they are. Though there are others who adopt the political struggle paradigm—some for reasons related to their democratic commitments—my analysis has yielded an original (and more detailed) account of the democratic costs adopting the war paradigm generates for transnational politics. This, in turn, has allowed me to illustrate—in conversation with empirical scholarship on framing effects—how rejecting the war paradigm in favor of the political struggle paradigm may facilitate cross-border political spaces becoming sites of genuinely democratic politics.

Cross-border politics that does not take the form of literal kinetic warfare has the potential to be democratic in ways battle is not. But participants risk squandering this potential when they unreflectively use the war paradigm to understand their circumstances and guide their behavior. Similarly, theorists may miss an opportunity to understand and encourage novel forms of democratic politics if they do the same. This makes exercising care in choosing between the war paradigm and the political struggle paradigm especially important. After all, politics is not just war by other means.