Grey Zone Warfare:
The phrase ‘grey zone warfare’ crops up in descriptions of Chinese actions around an island that it claims as its own.
- Grey Zone Warfare generally means a middle, unclear space that exists between direct conflict and peace in international relations.
- It can be broadly defined as the exploitation of operational space between peace and war to change the status quo through the use of coercive actions which remain below a threshold that, in most cases, would prompt a conventional military response.
- Activities characterised as grey zone warfare methods range from the use of proxies for kinetic action or change of territorial status quo through coercion to non-kinetic subversive actions such as cyberattacks, economic coercion, disinformation campaign, election meddling, and more recently, weaponisation of migrants.