Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare, civilisational geopolitics, and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F48546054%3A_____%2F22%3AN0000019" target="_blank" >RIV/48546054:_____/22:N0000019 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821001621?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821001621?via%3Dihub</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102502" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102502</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare, civilisational geopolitics, and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Original language description

Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.

Czech name

—

Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

50601 - Political science

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA19-12081S" target="_blank" >GA19-12081S: Transforming Security in the Age of Uncertainty: Understanding the Rise of Hybrid Warfare in the Czech Republic</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

Political Geography

ISSN

0962-6298

e-ISSN

1873-5096

Volume of the periodical

92

Issue of the periodical within the volume

102502

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

9

Pages from-to

1-9

UT code for WoS article

000704325000004

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85115434174