Join this interdisciplinary workshop on the blurred boundaries of 21st-century warfare
‘Grey Zone Warfare’ has emerged since 2014 as one of the key strategic challenges of the 21st century. This grey zone is neither fully war nor fully peace, neither fully in the military nor wholly in the civilian domain, but exists in a vague grey area in between. In this grey zone, states and non-state actors pursue their aims using methods that remain below the threshold of open conflict, and are often difficult to attribute or even to recognise. It is the domain where lines of computer code, hijacked passenger planes, or fake news are weapons wielded, requiring those who are on the receiving end to develop new thinking, new skills, and new tactics.
As important as this grey zone is supposed to be, it is also very hard to understand, which makes it even more of an imminent threat. Thus, it is both subject of a significant amount of US and NATO thinking and planning and, according to scholars, dangerously under-conceptualised. Even more profoundly, its hypothetical conceptual existence depends on various definitions of war and peace and the 'red lines' separating them either in a legal, an ideational or a policy sense.
In this workshop, key findings from the forthcoming book The Grey Zone: In Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2026) will be presented and discussed. An interdisciplinary collaboration of historians, political scientists, international relations and war studies experts, as well as legal scholars, the book presents a wide variety of case studies spanning a vast amount of space and time. Ranging from the Han Empire in the second century BCE to contemporary rivalries in the Arctic and the South China Sea, from the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century to the latter-stage Portuguese colonial empire in the twentieth century and to the cyber and international legal 'spaces' of our present and near-future, the book’s chapters analyse the grey zone without preconceptions.
The workshop thereby questions what type of activities were performed in this space, how they related to broader (geo-)strategic objectives and notions of victory, defeat, or temporary (dis)advantage. The aim is to effectively rewrite 'grey zone’s' troubled conceptual history, moving us beyond our current presentism, western-centricity, and methodological myopia, in order to both future-proof and fundamentally enrich debates and policies on the pressing issue of grey zone warfare.
At the EUI and the Robert Schuman Centre, we are dedicated to removing barriers and providing equal opportunities for everyone. Please indicate in the registration form your accessibility needs, if any. Alternatively, you can contact the logistics organiser of the event.
Registration is now closed.