Anxiety, Fatigue and Living with Hybrid Warfare in Czechia

Fuelled by the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the rapid rise of the notion of ‘hybrid warfare’ (HW) transformed the Czech security debate. Despite, the HW discourse heavily relies on old geopolitical tropes and anxieties linked to Czechia’s insecure positioning on the ‘Eastern boundary of the West’, a position that is seen as threatened also by the disregard of many Western allies. This generates intense feelings of ontological insecurity, giving the discourse a highly emotional nature – which makes critical engagement with it extremely difficult. In this paper, we turn to our personal auto-ethnographic reflections on the effects of HW the public debate, subjects enrolled within it, and possibilities of detachment and claiming a critical voice. Drawing on our and others personal narratives, we present several vignettes outlining experiences of academics, think-tankers, and public officers who remain at the side-lines of the HW debate. We discuss strategies that these actors employed to confront the debate and/or transform it. We thus recount the experience of living with hybrid warfare, including the affective states of anxiety and fatigue. In conclusion, we reflect on modes and possibilities of critique and thinking the alternatives of dominant security narratives from the margins of the debate.