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 & 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. First, employing the war paradigm to analyze the non-kinetic elements of hybrid cases involves adopting—or encouraging others to adopt—an adversarial point of view that casts participants on opposite sides of the border as “enemies” enmeshed in a radically adversarial relationship. This, in turn, undermines democracy by discouraging the formation and recognition of respectful relationships conducive to mutual learning and shutting down the possibility of solidaristic collaboration across borders. This part of my argument resembles Mouffe's (2000, pp. 101–104) view that pluralist democracy is stymied when political opponents see each other as “enem[ies] to be destroyed” (2000, p. 102) and enabled when they see each other instead as legitimate adversaries entitled to promote their views in the political arena. However, my view differs from Mouffe's in key respects—foremost, in its focus on the international context. Moreover, when Mouffe (2009) considers the implications of her democratic theory for international relations, she concludes we should strive for a “multipolar” world divided into distinct regions, each governed according to its own culture and values, and each enacting its own form of democracy, all of which are recognized as legitimate. But this tells us nothing about what would be necessary for political activity transcending the boundaries of Mouffe's regions to be democratic. That is the question I address here. Mouffe (2009, p. 553) accepts the division of the world into distinct “blocs” and envisions democracy as best served when none of these blocs tries to impose its values on the others. Conversely, I explore how the interstitial space between societies (which in many cases will be a space between regions or “blocs”) can itself be a site of democratic politics—and what could undermine its democratic potential. It is also noteworthy that my arguments (unlike Mouffe's) should be acceptable to a wide variety of democratic theorists, not only agonists. My arguments do not rely on any one conception of democracy—only on the existence of a few preconditions for democracy, endorsed by a wide range of democratic theorists who advocate divergent conceptions of democracy. In addition to making my view more ecumenical, this means I avoid the pitfall Mouffe (2009) identifies with some liberal theories of democracy—that they admit only one model of democracy as legitimate. Though theorists disagree about the precise requirements of democratic politics, there are a few features widely considered to be necessary for democracy. First, for political contestation to be democratic, all participants must be recognized as equally capable of making valid claims potentially worthy of being taken up by other participants. A wide range of democratic theorists with varying substantive and methodological commitments, including Christiano (2004, pp. 275–276), Blajer de la Garza (n.d., p. 13), Knight and Johnson (1997, pp. 279–282), Mouffe (2000, pp. 101–104), Schwartzberg (2016), and Young (2000, pp. 9–11, 23), have treated such equality as a central feature of democracy. Recognizing participants in political contestation as equals, in turn, requires genuine, good-faith consideration of their (often competing) claims. Part of genuinely considering a claim in good faith is admitting the possibility that it may have merit, even if this would necessitate revising one's own claims. Thus, democratic politics requires respectful recognition of others’ perspectives and openness to the possibility of learning from or collaborating with others who may be on the opposite side of a salient political divide. A similarly wide range of democratic theorists identify this as a central feature of democracy. For example, Young (2000, p. 3) maintains that democratic decision-making “requires a give and take that often leads to compromise” and that in a genuine democracy, “people aim to persuade one another of…their claims, and are open to having their own opinions…change in the process” (2000, p. 6). Blajer de la Garza (n.d., p. 13) holds that democratic deliberation requires open-mindedness and willingness to change one's opinion in response to others’ arguments. Christiano (2004, pp. 275–276) describes democratic decision-making as “a process of discussion…wherein others take one's views seriously and respond to one's views” and in which “each person's judgment…must be taken seriously.” And a distinguishing trait of agonistic democracy in Mouffe's (2000, pp. 101–103) view is that political opponents recognize each other's claims as legitimate and worth considering as interpretations of what commitments to liberty and equality require. Mouffe (2000, p. 102) also notes that participants in democratic politics can compromise and be “converted” to each other's perspectives. We can conclude, then, that a wide range of democratic theorists (despite their other disagreements) identify respectful recognition of others’ perspectives and openness to the possibility of learning from or collaborating with others (even political opponents) as central features of democracy. Granted, democratic politics may also require more than this. Respectful relationships conducive to mutual learning and collaboration may not be sufficient for democracy. But I maintain they are necessary, and this should be an uncontroversial assumption given the range of democratic theorists who endorse some version of it. Therefore, if (as I argue) adopting the war paradigm undermines our ability to recognize such democracy-supporting relationships when they transcend national borders, it undermines our ability to recognize cross-border political activity as democratic, even when it is in fact democratic. And if (as I argue) adopting the war paradigm undermines the ability of participants in cross-border politics to maintain democracy-supporting relationships, it undermines the potential for cross-border politics to become democratic—even if full democracy would require more in addition to these democracy-supporting relationships. If theorists present parties to cross-border political engagements as neatly divided enemies, with people on one side of the border dedicated to harming and destroying people on the other side, they will not likely interpret those parties as respectfully engaging with the perspectives of or being open to learning from or collaborating with people across the border. Thus, theorists who adopt the war paradigm will not likely interpret participants in cross-border politics as engaging in democratic politics. They will therefore risk overlooking or misrecognizing democratic cross-border politics if it does occur. Similarly, adopting the war paradigm will constrain how theorists see the options participants in cross-border politics face, obscuring some available options and overemphasizing others. Theorists beholden to the war paradigm will likely interpret participants as choosing among different ways of waging war—of harming their enemies—perhaps suitably constrained by just war principles, the LOAC, or military strategy. They will be correspondingly less likely to interpret participants as choosing among different ways of engaging in democratic politics—or even as choosing between waging war and engaging in democratic politics. The outcome of this choice (to wage war) is presupposed by the adoption of the war paradigm. In short, theorists who adopt the war paradigm interpret cross-border politics as adversarial rather than collaborative, likely overlook possibilities for collaboration and consultation among parties across borders, and can in turn fail to recognize these phenomena when they do occur. Moreover, if participants in cross-border politics adopt the war paradigm themselves, they will see those across the border as enemies they must harm and destroy—and arguably will not respectfully engage with the latter's perspectives, or be open to learning from or collaborating with them. That is, people on opposite sides of the border will not be able to engage together in democratic politics when they think of each other as enemies in this way. But this is precisely how they must think of each other when they understand their conflict in terms of the war paradigm. Gross's work illustrates these risks well. He uses the war paradigm to analyze several non-kinetic actions, grouping “armed violence, non-kinetic force, and soft power” together under the rubric of “guerrilla warfare” (Gross, 2015, p. 22). He treats “civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance” (Gross, 2015, p. 31) and what he calls “media warfare” as tactics of guerilla warfare (Gross, 2015, p. 30). “Media warfare,” as he understands it, is “characterized by an aggressive campaign of public diplomacy”—or, in another formulation, aggressive efforts to “disseminate opinion-shaping information” (Gross, 2015, p. 30). To clarify, Gross does not claim every attempt to “disseminate opinion-shaping information” (or every act of civil disobedience or nonviolent resistance) is an act of guerilla war. But for the purposes of developing an ethics of insurgency, his analysis focuses on devising ethical principles to govern these activities when they are understood as guerilla warfare. Even assuming Gross only means his analysis to apply in a subset of cases (because not all public diplomacy campaigns should be understood as guerilla warfare), his work still illustrates what happens when theorists do characterize them as warfare—how this characterization can affect theorists’ normative recommendations and understandings of the options open to participants in cross-border politics. Gross's choice to characterize the kinds of non-kinetic public diplomacy he analyzes as “media warfare” (even though he leaves open the possibility that other kinds may not qualify as warfare) directly affects his assessment of how participants should behave and what reasons should guide both their behavior and theorists’ evaluation of it. To illustrate, let's apply Gross's treatment of “media warfare” to the Counterinsurgency case. Understanding the activists and journalists reporting insurgents’ claims about civilian deaths as members of civil society rather than participants in the insurgents’ war would lead one to conclude they were not legitimate targets liable to attack as soldiers would be. Gross (2015, p. 300) might agree that completely neutral “third-party journalists” deserve special protection. However, he would arguably treat non-neutral parties, like activists and “media workers affiliated with a party to the conflict,” as engaging in warfare even if they only undertook the non-kinetic activity of disseminating information about civilian deaths (Gross, 2015, p. 300). It is with reference to such partisan media workers that Gross says journalists are “the foot soldiers of media warfare” (Gross, 2015, p. 300). (It is ambiguous how partisan one must be to forfeit “their claims to neutrality and the protection it infers” (Gross, 2015, p. 300).) Elsewhere, Gross argues journalists—it is not clear whether he means all journalists whose work benefits one party to a war or only those officially associated with a warring party—are liable to harm much like other combatants because they are “among the primary agents of media warfare” (Gross, 2015, p. 269). Though the fact that they usually do not pose lethal threats to others means they usually are not liable to be killed, the fact that they pose threats as participants in a war means they are liable to harms including “capture, incarceration, expulsion, or the destruction or confiscation of their equipment” (Gross, 2015, p. 269). Since Gross suggests we consider even non-kinetic media operations as possible acts of war, he would seem to present journalists—at least partisan journalists, and at most any journalists consistently disseminating information that could help insurgents—as participants in insurgents’ war. Characterizing the journalists in Counterinsurgency in this way would present them as enemies of all who oppose the insurgents, thereby obscuring the possibility that they may have any number of collaborative or solidaristic relationships with their audiences around the world. More generally, because Gross understands media activity using the war paradigm's adversarial lens, he would be ill-suited to recognize such cross-border collaboration and solidarity if they occurred. If participants in cross-border politics also adopt this lens—perhaps, as Gross suggests, incarcerating journalists that spread information favorable to their “enemies”—this could prevent cross-border collaboration from occurring in the first place. Moreover, if we understand insurgents, journalists reporting their claims, and audiences receiving them as co-participants in potentially democratic politics, we might characterize the insurgents’ options and their attendant advantages and disadvantages roughly as follows: They could truthfully depict events on the ground, providing transparency to an otherwise opaque military operation and giving global publics access to the information necessary to assess and, if appropriate, democratically contest it. Alternatively, they could present information in a deceptive way without outright lying. This would still give global publics access to true information they would otherwise lack. But the insurgents’ deception would detract from transparency and from the integrity of any democratic contestation based on their claims. Finally, the insurgents could spread unambiguously false information. Although this might serve their own strategic objectives, it would do nothing to enhance transparency and would deeply undermine the integrity of any political contestation based on their claims. Gross (2015, p. 271) recognizes these alternatives, distinguishing among “white, gray, or black” propaganda based on “truths, half-truths, and lies,” respectively. But, strikingly, his assessment of what option “guerrillas” should choose has virtually nothing to do with the independent merits of disseminating true information to or enabling good-faith deliberation among global publics (as opposed to manipulating them). These things are largely absent from Gross's analysis because “the truth is a legitimate casualty of just war” (2015, p. 269). Thus, he suggests, the ethical principles that usually govern communication do not apply in the same way to guerillas, and their decisions to deceive should instead be governed largely by the rules of war, such as necessity, proportionality, and other in bello rules (Gross, 2015, pp. 30, 269). If we thought of people separated by national borders (e.g., journalists, their sources in Libya (who may also be insurgents), and their audiences around the world) as potential collaborators or partners—perhaps engaged in a joint endeavor to uncover and appropriately respond to the truth about a military operation's threat to civilians—we would see deceitful interactions among them as unequivocally bad and as undermining their ability to engage in genuine democratic deliberation with each other. Gross (2015, pp. 288–9, 292) himself recognizes how deception can undermine the informed, conscientious decision-making democratic politics requires. But, in his view, this democratic politics is only appropriate within a state: “the importance of truth telling and disclosure is strongest among compatriots. Lying to the enemy is a different issue” (Gross, 2015, p. 289). Even when acknowledging that some non-enemy international actors “have a prima facie right to know the truth,” Gross (2015, p. 290) asserts, “their right seems considerably weaker than compatriots’ rights” and their claim to be told the truth can be overridden by considerations of military necessity. According to Gross (2015, pp. 290, 298), citizens of a democratic state are vested with civic responsibilities by virtue of the social contract their state embodies, which they can only exercise if they have access to accurate information about their government's operations. This provides a powerful reason for honesty and transparency among co-citizens. But this reason does not apply across borders: While co-citizens may be entitled to honesty, transparency, and the balanced presentation of opposing views, “Enemies…deserve no such temperance” (Gross, 2015, p. 298). This ambivalence about honesty toward non-compatriots underwrites Gross's startling suggestion that it is morally irrelevant whether the information disseminated as part of “media warfare” is true. For example, discussing the footage of a young boy's death that was used to spur on Palestinians and sour public opinion toward Israel in the Second Intifada, Gross (2015, p. 285) says, “it does not matter whether the video was fabricated or authentic.” He makes the same claim about records of the “Santa Cruz massacre” that aided the East Timorese in their fight for independence, arguing it would be of little moral consequence if we discovered the incident “was a staged media event” (Gross, 2015, p. 286). Because he does not see democratic politics as something that does or should occur as part of cross-border engagement, Gross is unconcerned about the ways such deception and manipulation would undercut the collaboration and solidarity needed for democratic politics. And those who behaved as Gross suggests, readily deceiving non-compatriots whenever this was a necessary and proportional way to serve their war aims (even assuming those aims were just), would be ill-placed to develop collaborative and solidaristic relationships with the targets of their deception. Thus, Gross's characterization of journalists as warriors and information dissemination as w