Manipulating the political subjectivity of territories in hybrid conflicts

Abstract

The article examines the information dimension of hybrid conflicts as an environment in which the traditional boundaries between war and peace are deliberately blurred. It demonstrates that hybrid aggression unfolds within multidimensional “grey zones,” where uncertainty becomes a key instrument of coercion. In such conditions, any sphere of social life can be weaponized, turning political reality itself into an object of manipulation. Special attention is devoted to the undermining of political subjectivity as a central mechanism of informational influence in hybrid conflicts. These manipulations are shown to be highly variable, encompassing a wide spectrum of practices ranging from targeted questioning of the victim state's autonomy and legitimacy to systemic denial of its history, culture and right to sovereign existence. An extreme form of this influence occurs when delegitimization is combined with the creation of fabricated subjectivity on parts of the victim state's territory, where fake political institutions are constructed, pseudo-referendums are staged and an artificially engineered “popular will” is proclaimed. The article argues that the creation of such pseudo-subjective territorial entities is only one possible form of informational aggression. Undermining political subjectivity may also occur without the formation of territorial grey zones, as in the case of China’s pressure on Taiwan, where the aggressor limits its strategy to delegitimization without attempting to construct pseudo-political entities. By contrast, the emergence of fabricated territorial subjectivity becomes possible only once the legitimacy of the victim state has already been weakened. Different hybrid conflicts exhibit varying degrees of intensity of this mechanism. The case of Moldova demonstrates a partial inversion of subjectivity: the state retains international legitimacy but loses control over part of its territory, which is used to maintain long-term “frozen” ambiguity. Ukraine represents a full-scale application of the dual strategy, where the denial of the state’s subjectivity is accompanied by active construction of pseudo-subjectivity on several of its territories. In this scenario, the two processes reinforce each other, producing a deep inversion of political subjectivity in which the legitimate state is recast as an “object,” while the fabricated territorial entities are presented as putative political actors. The article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding this mechanism as a significant component of modern hybrid conflicts. It concludes that informational manipulation of the subjectivity of territories generates a new type of threat in the field of international political security, one that requires a rethinking of existing scholarly and practical approaches to countering hybrid aggression.